Same as it ever was.

So my operating system's fucked. I have no idea. Everything got fixed, a full day of seamless, fine workings, then this morning before I even got to check Livejournal, kablooey.

I called Dell to fix it, then my ISP to see why I wasn't getting online, called Dell to say the ISP hadn't been able to fix anything, then ran some diagnostic tests to find out that it's my operating system that isn't working right anymore, not any of the other software or hardware, so I need to restart my system from scratch.

And I'm no longer a student at the University of Pittsburgh, which means no connections to people with copies of Windows XP. So I'll have to buckle down and settle for the copy of Windows 7 that came with my computer.

It occurs to me this is pretty much what happened the last time I got the sort of virus that needed someone to wipe down my computer - a little bit of time where everything went well, then something coming along to royally fuck things up worse than before.

Guess I know what I'm doing tonight.

You and your sister.

What sold me on Windows 7 is that just about all of my stuff was there already. And what didn't come over was stuff I backed up Saturday night. I lost a few of the sites I bookmarked yesterday, but I can live with that - mostly job listings, and the good ones were sent to me through e-mail anyway. I can pull together a few cover letters tomorrow night without a fuss.

I don't know what happened in between now and the last time I tried using this operating system. I know this won't ever be as intuitive for me as XP was - it's got a funny way of constructing things that I don't find very straightforward - but it's not quite so much of a struggle now as it was when I first got this computer. Probably because I already had my stuff here, and knew what I was supposed to find, instead of starting from the ground up.

So I'll be around for a while yet.