I Was Right All Along

Display driver problems: that's what hosed my PC last week, not a blown hard drive. I'm back in business now, but I'll spare you all the trials and tribulations and the count of system recoveries we did to figure that out. Anyway, some advice: if you have a recently purchased HP PC, don't download the game Peggle. You'll be sorry.

And even more significant advice: don't buy an HP PC, because they don't play nice when something goes wrong. Everything is so proprietary that you have to fight like a little dog ahold of an ankle to get any answers out of them. Their service reps read (or chat online) from a script and then ultimately ask you to send the PC to them because it "must be a hardware problem". Once we were 100% sure it was a display driver problem, they wouldn't give us any instructions how to recover that driver from a DOS prompt (which is what we needed, because the PC kept rebooting itself without fully starting up).

Ah, well. A learning experience.