As I write, it’s nearly 8 o’clock on Wednesday evening, and I’m coming to the end of the worst few computing days I’ve ever had. You’ll know from my previous post that my main desktop PC crashed on Friday morning, for the reasons explained. I added a comment written on Tuesday morning while I was awaiting further news. I write now, having got the machine back on Tuesday evening and then spent a couple of frustrating hours fiddling with it, because in re-installing XP the shop wiped all my installed programs. I hadn’t realised that would happen — when they said they’d done a backup for me, I thought they’d meant everything, not just the data in the sub-folders under the My Documents folder. It was good to get all that back, of course — but the work involved in re-installing all the programs, big and small, that I’d installed over the past two years or so, is colossal. All my e-mail settings and mail archive — gone; my IE7 favourites and add-ons — gone; my home network configuration — gone. My most recent photographs, running into the hundreds and stored not under My Documents but a shared folder instead — gone. To say I was dismayed is an understatement.

I felt even more frustrated when I discovered the sound card didn’t work any more. I couldn’t get an output from the jack sockets on the back of it, only from the headphone socket on the front of the PC. And I couldn’t get any audio in to the sound card via the line-in jack socket on the back — so I wouldn’t be able to do any recording work. Worse still, the dreaded flickering screen, the original Friday morning problem, had resumed — though thankfully, not the BSOD — the Blue Screen Of Death. I went to bed feeling like my world had crashed along with my PC.

As soon as this morning dawned, I was up and at it. I tried to ignore the occasionally flickering screen as I reinstalled programs like Microsoft Word and Excel. Then came the biggest blow: out of all the files that had been backed up and restored under My Documents, the most important one, my Excel spreadsheet containing my entire accounting system for the past year, wouldn’t open. All the other restored files, thousands of ‘em, are fine as far as I can tell. The one that I really need: corrupted.

And I hadn’t backed it up. At all.

The shop tried to recover it from the backup they’d made. No good. While they were doing that, I was trying to get my home network running again. It took me the best part of five hours. Eventually I had some succcess with that. But that damned accounts file kept playing on my mind … by 2pm I was on the verge of crying in frustration, cursing myself for being such an idiot. WHY DIDN’T I DO A BACKUP???

The screen flicker was getting worse again. Every mouse movement caused it to flash off and on. I called the shop again and after explaining about the sound card not working as well as the screen still playing up, they suggested I take it back to them.

Before I did, I rebooted and made a backup of all the files under My Documents onto the Seagate 320GB external drive I’ve had for months (so why didn’t I do a backup before??!). The flickering disappeared after the reboot.

In the shop, they downloaded and installed the latest drivers for the Sound Blaster Audigy audio card. It worked. Sound started coming out through the rear jack sockets again. They also took my advice (at last — I’d told them several times that loads of other people had cured their flickering problem by installing the latest drivers) and downloaded and installed the latest nVidia drivers for the video card (they hadn’t done that when they reinstalled XP, they installed the 2004 drivers that came with XP).

I brought it home, set it all up yet again, plugged it in. It’s been on for three hours. Not a flicker has crossed the screen. At first I could get sound out of the card, but couldn’t get any in. Some more fiddling with the audio playback/record settings has, at last, worked. I can record again.

So it looks like I’m gradually getting back to some semblance of normality — except I’ve got to reload all my recent photos from the memory cards on the camera, reload the Kodak Easyshare software I use to catalogue them (that’ll take more days than I care to think about), I’ve got to buy and install something like Cute FTP because I’ve lost my old copy and can’t upload flexibly to my site (hence no pics with these most recent posts) — and I’ve got to go back over ten months of this year’s accounts and rebuild my lost spreadsheet, picking through the invoices, receipts, bank accounts and credit card statements and painstakingly recreate the Excel formulae that I’d developed over the past 15 years of bolting bits and pieces onto my wildly creative, only-I-can-understand-it masterpiece of a spreadsheet.

WHY OH WHY DIDN’T I DO A BACKUP?

Don’t ask me. I’m just the stupid idiot around here.

My desktop PC’s crashed. Big Time.

It’s been misbehaving a bit for the past couple of weeks — an occasional flicker would cross the screen and I’d think, “Hmmm — what was that?” Then it wouldn’t do it again and I’d just carry on working. But on Friday morning, after bringing the PC off standby and going to the kitchen to make my first cup of tea of the day, I returned bleary-eyed to find a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death), something I’ve not seen for a number of years now and never on any of my Windows XP machines. It said something about Windows having shut down because of a driver problem, the file NV4_disp having gone into an infinite loop. I figured this was a display driver file for the nVidia card.

I rebooted and it started up OK, but the flicker was now much more prevalent — every time I moved the mouse the screen would go off for a moment. Then after a few more mouse movements, up came the BSOD again.

Another reboot. I managed to open IE7 and Googled “NV4_disp”, finding 161,000 references to it. Aha — obviously, I wasn’t the only one having problems. The first site I managed to access before I crashed yet again, Christopher Jason’s, detailed in a post dated January 2006 how his Dell Dimension suddenly started misbehaving one day with exactly the same problem as mine. He suggested a fix, which involved downloading the latest nVidia drivers and replacing the older ones. It worked for him, and for many of his readers over the next 18 months, but not all of them.

Well, it didn’t work for me either. I downloaded the drivers from the nVidia site and began uninstalling the existing drivers. Problem: the uninstall process required a reboot to finish the job, and each time I did that the system reinstalled the old drivers again before I could get a chance to install the new ones! The nVidia site said I had to uninstall the old drivers before installing the later ones. I tried going into Safe Mode and doing it from there — but after managing to uninstall the correct drivers without a reboot being required and then immediately installing the new drivers, a reboot produced a 640 x 480 display. When I tried to set it to a higher resolution, the screen went blank. When I tried to reboot again, whether in in Safe Mode or any other mode, it locked up and refused to budge.

It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I had a production job to finish before going out for the afternoon and evening — we had tickets for Van Morrison’s open-air concert in the grounds at Glastonbury Abbey — but of course I now couldn’t do my production job because all the audio files were on the PC. I also had a TV commercial to voice on the ISDN line at midday, and it was already, like, 11:15am.

In desperation I called Horizon Computers in Worle and arranged to rush the PC over there after my midday voice job. I was hopeful that I’d have it back by Saturday morning. Then we set off, a little later than planned, for Glastonbury. Horizon called me during the afternoon to say that the problem was more deep-seated than just the NV4_disp driver — their diagnostics had found many corrupted XP files and a reinstall was on the cards, which would take until Monday to fix.

We really enjoyed the concert, and pics and a proper post about it will follow — although I can blog from the laptop, I can’t get the photos off the camera without the PC!

Another site I checked out later, the nVidia Forum, has a thread, which started in May 2005, about the same problem. It’s the most viewed topic at the forum with nearly 233,000 views and 155 replies. Seems Dell and nVidia have known about the issue for ages and it might also involve a couple of blown resistors on the video card. Horizon tell me my hardware all checks out OK and they think it’s more likely a virus has corrupted my system, though personally I have my doubts because I’m normally quite careful about stuff like that. But we’ll see. We’ll see.

Roll on Monday.