Sigh.

Still not fixed, but at least I have a better handle on what is going on.

It's the network.

If I unplug the network cable, it boots up fine. Just peachy. The moment I plug in the cable, and the networking hits the "connected" state, BLAM. Blue Screen of Death.

WTF.

I've done a lengthy "Windows XP Repair", reset the Winsock stack, uninstalled and reinstalled the network card drivers, and basically tried everything I could think of. And still the problem happens, unchanged, and unaffected by any of my attempts to fix or repair things.

I guess the next thing is to just try and reinstall Windows XP completely (not just a 'repair'). Ugh. I have some indications that that won't work from my research on the web, where people have said that the only thing that worked was completely wiping/formatting the disc and reinstalling from scratch.

I think I'm going to go buy one of those USB Backup disks and back up everything tomorrow... and then proceed with reinstalls.

I wish I knew what the heck happened. Everything was fine until around 11am, and then it just died. I can only imagine the computer was hacked or something... or there was a stray cosmic ray that just happened to destroy my network to the point where it's unrepairable.

This sucks so much. I hate Mercury Retrograde.

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?