Formatting: A Last Resort

A few months ago, my father passed down to me something that I've been desiring for many years, a good laptop. The laptop was nice. A couple years old, but still nice with 1280 megabytes of ram, I think processor is in the field of about 1.8 gigahertz and it's wide screen. So, all went well for many weeks. I would bring it to class and goof off, let my friends use it, and listen to music and play games when I went to my real home on the weekends. It was great. But good things for some unknown reason, can only last so long. Disaster suddenly striked!

I turn it on one day and as it starts up, wouldn't you know it? The dreaded blue screen of death. Before giving me enough time to even register what had happened, the computer restarts. "Fuck," or "Oh shit," is probably all I said for the next five minutes, as I kept trying to log on, but only once making it to the desktop at which point every program that starts at startup had an error message, and it crashed and restarted again. What had happened? Was it all that porn? No. I had not recently used it for porn, so that shouldn't be the cause. What had happened between the last time it worked and now? ...Oh, right. I had allowed my friend, while we were a bit under the influence of alcohol, to use the laptop. What could he have done?

Countless tries at a reinstall of windows XP later, and no progress, for some reason some files are always unable to be copied, what the fuck is going on? Somethings dawns on Pee, why don't we try taking out each of the RAM chips in turn and seeing what happens. I didn't think it would work and I still don't fully understand why it did, but for some reason, my gig stick of RAM was the cause of all my troubles. Whether it was loose, broken, or corrupted by some virus, it was the problem. Windows installed fine, and runs fine without it, although slower. If I try to reinsert it back in, it starts up fine, but most programs refuse to run, claiming some file they need is corrupted or not there. We're currently working on making a CD using memtest86 and seeing if it can see any problems with the RAM.

If we had tried taking out the RAM earlier, we probably wouldn't have had to reinstall XP and would therefor have not wiped out my hard drive, since we had assumed initially that it was the problem. Oh, and we think that my friend, after powering off the laptop for the night, put it down in a not so gentle fashion, which may have caused the memory to loosen and break... Or something. I'm just happy it's working again.