the blog quebecois

Well, I finally solved my browser problem. I was working on something and looked up to see that the monitor display had rotated counterclockwise 90 degrees. It was as if I'd picked up the monitor and put it down on its left side. Uh-oh, thinks me. This could be a sign that something might be wrong.

Now the recommended fix for this problem is to indeed flip the monitor on its side so that everything's right-side up and there you go.

But part of me hungered for a more elegant solution. My first thought was that the monitor was blown, but it has an onscreen menu and when I brought that up it was correctly positioned. Windows booted normally until it loaded the Welcome splash screen, when it again went sideways. So it's the video card or the driver.

The video card reported that it was in tip-top shape, thankyewverymuch (and if you think it's a lot of fun checking these things out while tilting your head at an angle it was never meant to go -- well, you would be wrong). I reinstalled the video drivers with no effect.

Then I remembered that XP has something called "recover points," by which you can restore a working copy of the system if something goes wrong. I was under the impression that it was done automatically, 'cause, like, that's what the documentation says. Since my software seemed pretty stable and the only hardware I had installed on the machine was a second hard drive, I never thought of manually creating one. Guess I should have.

About the only thing left to try was reinstalling Windows. I hate doing that, because it takes a long time and if it fails you're truly hooped. I did it often enough with Windows 98, though, so I found the install disk and put it in the drive to learn to my horror that XP (or at least this particular eMachines distro) doesn't allow for a non-destructive install -- it wipes the C drive first.

So I finally figured out how to force it to boot into Safe mode and spent the next few hours copying files to my D drive. Fortunately for my irreplacable collection of midget porn porn illegally downloaded music irreplacable files, I had enough room.

I took a deep breath and started the install, which took surprisingly little time. And what do you know, my video problems went away. As did my FTP program and some other things I forgot to copy.

Could have been worse, much worse. Looking on the bright side, my browser now works flawlessly, too.