I go OC-Monk-style when it comes to my things. So when I got home last night and noticed that the room was clean — I was going berserk. (I’m sure my lola meant well, pero …) I noticed a toy on top of the computer monitor was on the floor.
(The computer was booting Windows as I did this) I picked up the toy, it got tangled in the extension cord wires, resulting in a disco of off-and-ons for the AVR. (Whee.)
I tried starting up the computer, lo and behold, a crucial system file, hal.dll has gone missing/corrupt.
Tried looking for an installer, and while it worked, the XP installer doesn’t recognize my SATA harddrive, so I can’t repair. I could run drivers for the SATA on floppy, if only my floppy drive worked, plus, to make the said floppy, I have to be in Windows. (Who uses floppy disks nowadays?)
And that’s what you get from cleanliness. As I type, I’m running Ubuntu from a CD I found in the mess. Running the OS from the CD means running slower and running it in read-only mode, so I can’t mount my IDE drives, plus, since I need to save some files, I’m using my flash drive as HD. Go resourcefulness?
It looks like I’m not the only one having computernet woes. Moral of the story? Hide the key better, or never clean up.
your mind will go pi. 
