This morning I arose as I normally do, shuffled the wife off to work, and started up my computers, looking forward to a day of gaming, cigarettes, coffee, and (once noon rolls around) beer.
My Norton popped up on my desktop saying "Thou must updateth thy virus definitions!", so I did. Then the obligatory "Thou must restarteth thy computer." So I did. As it was restarting I was tooling around on my laptop, thus not paying attention to the Desktop. When I looked up it was the dark grey limbo screen that you get between all the startup crap that it displays in ASCII and the little floaty windows logo, and there it remained. No bleeps sweeps or creeps coming from the CPU, just the fan whirring away. So I tried to restart by a number of methods (Ctrl+alt+del, push power button once - which on my compy defaults to normal shutdown, then when nothing else worked, I held in the power button). After it was shut off, I unplugged my bluetooth adapter and digital camera, then powered up. It gave me a series of beeps (once, three short, three short, once or beep, beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep, beep) and proceeded to do absolutely nothing except run the fan. Nothing starts up (monitor keyboard mouse etc) and I am completely at a loss as to how to do anything about this.
Dismayedly yours
Chavez
