Elfnoodles

Yesterday was a bad day for technology around here.

Without going into too much laborious detail, I was trying to install a new piece of software and change the location of its user files. It kept failing to move the user files, and eventually while I was watching the directory they were going to, I found out the software was confused and was trying to move all of my user files, not just those specific to itself. No wonder it couldn’t move them.

At some point in all of this, apparently Windows XP became suspicious that I was trying to tamper with it or make an illegal copy or something – I still don’t know what – and refused to do anything else until I “activated” Windows.

The PC I am using – which I have had for a few years by the way – I bought direct from Dell and it has the Windows certification key stuck right to the case. So I entered it, and… Windows didn’t take it. We checked and re-checked it. But XP insisted that I either buy a new license, or call customer service. WTF?

Fearing that we had a 40-minute support call on our hands, Thud came home from work a little early so that he could watch Cory while I was on the phone. I made the call from my cell phone (because incidentally, this is where we discovered that the Vonage phone was nonfunctional again), but in fact I never spoke to a person. I spent several minutes talking to voice-recognition software and assuring it that I was not trying to install Windows on a another machine. That computer decided to re-activate this computer, gave me a long code to enter, and that was it.

Well, almost. iTunes then decided that it was a different computer, so I had to “activate” it there too to listen to my purchased music again. Plus, I still had the problem with my user files, and having totally freaked out Windows once while trying to fix it I determined that the only way to correct that was to back up all my stuff and create a new user account in XP to start over. I’ve been setting my workspace back up ever since. Also, deleting my old profile inexplicably broke my sound card driver, so I had to reinstall it.

Everything seems to be working now, until the next thing I find that doesn’t.

Please feel free to comment that I should go buy a Mac if you can donate the funds for it. Keep in mind that it has to be fairly high-end to handle gaming. Otherwise I am afraid I will have to stick with this PC for a few more years and you will just get a boot to the head. Sorry.