Hostage situation

I am currently being held hostage in my own home. Fortunately, it is a benign situation. There are no evil minions holding me against my will; just my computer. I have the quintessential love / hate relationship with technology. I adore the conveniences technology affords. I love the fact that the world is, literally, at your fingertips when you are surfing the Net. But I despise the fact that my computer is able to outwit me.

My desktop computer has gone belly-up. Again. This happened initially in the Spring of 2007, and luckily my neighbor was able to sort it out for me. The crashing of my hard disk was actually the first time Abby and Emily saw me cry. You see all of my pictures were on the computer, and they were not backed up. The thought of all those memories lost... ugh.

Anyway, it crashed again last December. Fortunately my dad was out to help me fix it. This time, though, I am on my own. I called dad this morning and explained the situation. He gave me some initial pointers, but this time I can't even get into safe mode. Dad's assessment, "Hmmmm. That sounds bad." Fabulous.

Previously when this has happened I have blamed the kids. They have access to other computers, but something always comes up and they find a reason to pop onto mine. Well, this time no one touched it but me. Life is so much more fun when you have someone else to blame for the mishaps, isn't it?

What I can't understand, though, is why this keeps happening (oh, did I mention my laptop is toast as well!?). I have antivirus software. I don't do much more than blog, keep spreadsheets, and surf the web. I certainly don't tinker with anything having to do with the interanl workings. I surf mainstream sites where, I would think, I would be unlikely to pick up Internet cooties. So why does my computer(s) keep doing this? Do I have some sort of electromagnetic field surrounding me that causes hard drives to lose their sysconfig32 file?! It is the only logical solution that I can come up with at this point.

Obviously, I have more computers or I wouldn't even be typing this. That is the good news. The bad news is that at the rate I am going I've only got a month or so before I kill this one too.