In which it’s that time of year again!

About every year, Windows gets reinstalled on my personal computer.

This is not because I enjoy reinstalling Windows, oh no. It’s because it shits the bed about every twelve months and has to be reinstalled.

My darling Eee PC 900HA (my baby, my littlest, my daily driver) started hanging ultra mega hard* about a week ago, and for various reasons – namely drunkenness and debauchery, plus a lot of gigging – I didn’t get it fixed right away.

My brother took a look at it and agreed with me that the issue wasn’t, in fact, hardware failure (it’s so great to have a geek next door!) which was lovely because of course the thing’s a month out of warranty.

I could only tweet from my phone because my iPod Touch battery died since I couldn’t plug it into the netbook. My Twitter, blog, and Facebook presence suffered mightily, and don’t even get me started on my lack of coherent job search. I also failed to help a friend’s friend with his computer shopping, missed a bunch of FB memes of varying hilarity, am way behind on my email, and didn’t manage to properly thank PJ for the unexpected parcel full of wool yarn and bath salts.

My Internet withdrawal finally got to the part with the DTs and drooling, so today I borrowed from my brother, who is awesome, a giant external hard drive and his laptop.

Right now I’m backing up my data onto the external drive while I apply for about six jobs via the laptop. (I’m afraid that one of the “jobs” was a bogus phishing attempt and I gave them my fucking email address and phone number before I figured it out. Creeps! A pox on their houses!)

When the backup completes I’ll wipe the Eee PC clean, format it, partition it, install Windows, download service packs, download updates, install applications, and then transfer my data back onto it. And then? Then I’ll have normal, regular, working, non-crashing, non-OMFG-THIS-IS-SO-PISSING-ME-OFF! access to the Internet, yea verily, and it shall Be Good!

*Geeky Details: I installed .NET the day before the issue became apparent; not sure if that’s related. Netbook booted up fine, boot booster was running, all good. Windows loaded, apps loaded. Used the thing and it would just… hang. No drive activity at all. Forever, until hard-booted. Uptime varied from a few minutes to half an hour. I checked my tools and it seemed there was a lot of services.exe activity, but there was also more ‘net activity than I’d normally expect. Virus? Full scans found no viruses or rootkits. After each hang, it would reboot as if it hadn’t been turned off improperly (save once, the second time, when scandisk told me it had had to repair a bunch of kernel files). If I turned it on and didn’t launch any applications, it would run almost indefinitely, but all the apps I ran – Firefix, iTunes, Calibre, even Process Explorer – would cause it to just seize up. It hasn’t seized once during the hour-plus process of copying files to the external drive. A registry cleaner app told me my registry was a hot tranny mess. I blame Canada.