The jury is still out

Back when we first moved away from Sydney, my husband suggested I do "something" constructive with my time while we are living in Darwin for 2 years. He told me he didn't care much what I did as long as I wasn't bored and lonely while he was at sea. I kind of poked around a little and decided to enrol in some university studies externally, which is why this blog started, as a requirement of the first unit I was studying.

In order to keep both myself and my husband happy this meant that we needed another computer. We only had 3 ;) One of them is a very old laptop with about 40mb of internal memory, one of them is a fairly old desktop that won't run certain games that my husband likes to play (such as Star Wars: Empire at War), and one of them is the desktop that does play the games and was connected to the Internet. It sounds like a lot, but it's not enough - the old laptop crashed, the old desktop is used by three of the four children, and the other desktop didn't work as a time share arrangement. So we got a new laptop, one the kids aren't allowed to touch, has wireless internet (yay!) and can be used when we're travelling.

Which is a good thing, as it turns out. Two nights ago I turned the desktop computer off before I went to bed, wondering what was causing it to be so slow at opening up FireFox and if there was a virus or something I needed to scan for again. Yesterday morning I turned it on and found out what was wrong - BSOD! Apparently something went wrong with creating or saving a registry entry and now the computer needs to be fixed. Given that I am in the middle of a study period for uni that is delivered completely online and my husband is in the middle of a sea-going period that requires him to spend most of his time, funnily enough, at sea, the new laptop is a real life saver. If my desktop computer had crashed and we had no other computer capable of connecting to the internet I would have to withdraw from the uni unit which would be both a) bad for my study record and b) bad for the hip pocket as I think we've passed the census date for the study period so I wouldn't be able to withdraw without paying for the unit. It's also really lucky that part of the last unit taught me the value of Delicious so I have all my bookmarks.

So now I get to find out how good I really am at following instructions. I Googled the failure notice my BSOD gave me and found out what it is plus a way of fixing it. This fix is slightly risky in that I may lose all the data on that computer but hey, it probably needed a new install anyway. And at least I still have my laptop. The bad thing is that the current work I was doing for the study period was on the desktop which means I can't access it before it is due to be submitted on Monday, so I'm hoping to be granted the extension I requested.

And let that be a lesson to me - always keep your work on a second computer, online server or flash drive, just in case of Microsoft living up to it's reputation.