ARGH!

This is completely not druid related.  Whatsoever.  Actually it’s only tangentially WoW related for that matter.

Last night I finally got footage of Valiona and Theralion to put together a guide video for the encounter (I actually got footage of Nef too – but we lost our add tank about 5% and I was summarily smooshed by the adds, so I canned the footage and figured I’d try next week…which pretty much turned out to be a huge mistake).  I was pretty excited about it and had planned to work on the audio recording tonight when I got home from work.  However, apparently Friday the 13th and my computer had different plans for me.

This morning when I went to log into my computer and check the forums before heading to the officer, my computer completely locked up.  It let me log in just fine.  But then everything froze.  I was able to ctrl-alt-delete and select “task manager”, but once the selection was made everything froze again.  So I restarted my machine.

Only it didn’t restart.

I got an error message telling me that it could not boot and that I needed to insert the boot disc and try again.  Uh.  Okay?  So I simply attempted to restart my machine again.  And got the same error message.  FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK.  This is NOT happening.  It just can’t be.  Mostly, because I can’t deal with it happening right now.

But it is.

I got Brade out of bed, as I started to panic, and stated “just so you know if this isn’t fixed when I get home, I’m pretty much going to lose it”.  To which he gave me a look that could only say “are you fucking kidding me woman, I’m not a miracle worker here”.  Which, you know, is fair.  Because he’s not a miracle worker, and pretty much knows less about this shit than I do.  So as I left the house for work, already 10 minutes later than I should have, he was lovingly unplugging SATA and power cables to my hard drives and plugging them back in to see if it was just something loose causing the problems.

It wasn’t.

And so he loaded my PC up into his car so I could come by and pick it up on my way home from work and deliver it to our local computer shop.  Because there was no way I was going to be able to lug that monster alienware case down the stairs to get it to my car.  Hell, I might not even make it from my car to the door – which would have resulted in me having to be a complete weenie and embarrassingly go in and ask one of the repair guys to come and fetch it from my car for me.  

Of course, Brade, knowing that I’m pretty much a ticking bomb with the stress of the upcoming move, let me know that he’s going to try to make time to deliver my broken computer during his lunch for me.  Which means that the computer guys can start diagnosing it faster.  It also means that I don’t have to be that wimpy girl and fail at being able to move my own PC from point A to point B.

Now, my biggest fear is that my hard drive is fried.  Not that I can’t replace it, because that’s really not going to be a huge deal.  In fact, I can get a bigger, faster hard drive in its place, which would be cool.  But rather because I haven’t backed up anything on that hard drive…ever.  Yup, I’ve 250 gigs of un-backed up shit.  You see, this PC didn’t agree with my ancient external hard drive, and I was pretty much too cheap/lazy to get a new external for back up purposes – and thus I have no external drive holding all my precious shit that I don’t want to lose.  So if my hard drive is toast (which I’m really hoping isn’t the case), I’m going to have to pray that the geniuses at the computer shop and recover some of my data.  I am also going to be swinging by costco tonight and picking up that 1tb external for seventy bucks that I’ve been looking at for the past two months and saying “you know, I really should pick one of these up in case something ever happens to my machine”.

But that?  That’s not even the WORST of it.  No, the worst of it is that in preparation for the move, I’ve already packed all of my back up discs and programs.  Yes, they are now living in one of probably half a dozen different boxes.  So if the issue is a kaput hard drive, I’m going to have to go unpack in order to get my machine set back up again.  My windows discs, my office discs, photoshop, vegas, etc.  And I’m going to have to redownload FRAPS and that program that found after searching google that let me extract and read .ogg files.  Set up filezilla again so I can upload onto the server hosting the guild website – and pray I took good notes for which passwords went with which thing.  Not to mention that I will have to re-install vent, which means trying to recall exactly wtf my administrator password is.

So, as you can see, pretty much just a huge fucking mess.  That I pretty much can’t really deal with right now.  I mean, obviously I can, but really?  Not so much.

At least I’ve got a laptop that is almost as powerful as my desktop to work with in the interim?  The silver lining, I suppose?

But it also means no Valiona video until the repair guys are done holding my machine hostage and I can get everything back up and running again. 😦

/sigh