My PC is Broke-ded!

Yesterday my PC was slain by Microsoft.

We had some bad weather in the area, and I was involved in my weekly World of Warcraft session. Windows was doing one of those irritating automatic updates, and then the power flickered, causing my computer to shut off.

Not thinking much of it, I turned it back on, only to be greeted with blue screen hell that indicates your CPU could explode at any minute. I tried to use Safe Mode, also to no avail.

So I called tech support, and after talking to someone from the Philippines for an our and pretty much getting nowhere (other than a confirmation that the brownout during the Windows update was probably the culprit, I feared the worst--a zapped computer with unrecoverable files. I'm bad at infrequent at backing up my files, so I'm terrified of the possibilities.

Ironically, the same thing killed my wife's computer about a year or so ago.

I took the unit to a local repair joint, where they told me the hard drive was responsive, and they felt optimistic that everything could be recovered. They'll run a diagnostic, put the hard drive contents on my external drive, and reload Windows, assuming that everything goes smoothly.

Here's hoping it can be resurrected. And I'll definitely eliminate that automatic update shit (and buy a battery update) so this won't happen again.