Dell-usion

It's never a good thing when my daughter says 'Would you look at my PC?' She's not a geek, and she hates asking me to look at it, because I will ask her geekish questions, and suggest geekish solutions, and offer geekish advice. I usually get about a third of the way into that litany before she decides oh, I'll just live with it. Only this time, she can't.

Vista -- well, died is a little extreme. Let's say went catatonic. Became delusional. Entered a fugue state.

Would it start? Oh, yeah, it'd start -- but it wouldn't allow you to select any of the user ids from its startup screen, or, if it did, wouldn't display the user's desktop, or, if it did, wouldn't allow you to select any of the options on the desktop. I restarted it about a zillion times, and was beginning to have muttered conversations with my wife to the effect of If we have to replace that son-of-a-bitch, I'm getting the cheapest damn laptop I can find and putting XP on the damn thing.

Which might still be what happens, but I did find out about the F8 menu on boot, that'll bring up a raft of somewhat comprehensible Repair Options. We're trying System Restore now. Actually, we're trying Disk Repair, and then, if we're lucky, Restore.

Hoo, boy.

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I have the habit of thinking that things which I don't know how to do are impossible, and things which I know how to do are trivial. Well -- I'm not at the 'it was trivial' stage quite yet. But, after several hours, and use of the F8 screen -- it's up.

I may have to back off just a skosh on sliming Vista, after all. Just a skosh.