Sorry to interrupt the steady stream of Cruise Vacation photos... but my personal computer just died. Blue Screen of Death. And every attempt to reboot will boot all the way to the desktop, where it immediately blue-screens.

Sigh.

I've tried everything to fix it, and am now in the process of doing an XP "repair" install, and hoping for the best. And hoping I don't lose much.

The particular STOP code on the Blue Screen of Death indicated, according to all internet searches, a possible hardware failure, which is not good. But the fact that I can boot fine into "Safe Mode", and boot into all the diagnostic modes, bodes well I guess. But the moment I boot into "Safe Mode with Networking" my system dies again, so who knows.

Hopefully the "repair" will work... and I won't lose my photos, which are all on the hard disk on that machine. Worst, it's a striped RAID set, so I can't just pull out one drive and connect it to another machine. Bleh. Remind me never to get a RAID-0 system again. I thought it would be cool and fast (it is faster), but it's mostly just doubling the chances for failure.

Sigh. Thank the stars for this laptop.

THis is all on top of some serious network problems, and more. It's definitely been one of those days. Do I thank Mercury Retrograde for this?