PC Troubles

My long absence is primarily due to the fact the our PC is completely fried. I'll try to give you the short version.

Thursday morning, my wife called me at work and said it was booting up with "funny colors" and then the monitor would go to sleep. It would then attempt to reboot and only allow it to boot in Safe Mode.

I came home at lunchtime and gave it a look, and sure enough, I couldn't get it to boot normally either. The last thing I had done the night before was play Peggle (that game I'm still addicted to). So real quick, I scurried out and bought some memory sticks (our DVD writer isn't working, either), I backed up all our files and my wife's Outlook Express. Damn! She had 3 gigabytes of email saved! I had to zip that.

I uninstalled a bunch of stuff, and eventually tried reloading the nVidia display driver. That fixed it! For about 15 minutes. Once again, the last thing I did before it went south was play Peggle. So, I uninstalled Peggle and decided to go ahead and do a standard system recovery (which runs from a partition in the hard drive, and is supposed to restore the original factory settings without losing any data).

That worked, all I had to do was reload MS Office, virus and anti-spyware software, and import my wife's address book and email settings. Everything was looking nifty. This was Friday night.

Saturday morning, because I can't help touching the wet paint, I played Peggle again. Sure enough, within 5 minutes, the PC spontaneously rebooted itself and was again having the boot up problems.

Crap. OK, so I try the standard recovery again. Hmmmmm . . . this time, hitting F10 to start the process did not work. It took it back to the Safe Mode boot screen. Now what? OK, I have all the files backed up, so I figured I would try a FULL recovery, using the recovery DVDs I made shortly after buying the PC.

That took several hours to run, but it seemed to be running correctly. Well, in the end, it didn't help. Now, I'm still getting the funny colors, still getting the safe mode boot screen, but it won't fully boot up, even in safe mode. I can't even get a command prompt. It keeps telling me "setup incomplete. Run setup again." I've tried that three times.

Anyway, I'm done with Peggle, and everything else at this point. Someone's coming to look at it this week. He thinks the game wrote something to the registry that corrupted a file needed in the boot sequence. This is officially beyond my level of computer competence.

At least the laptop still works with a wireless connection to the router, so I'm not fully out of commission, which is good since I'm on call this week.

So now you know the whole story.