BSOD

A few days ago, I transferred the presentations from last week's conference. I copied them from a thumb drive onto my computer. Somehow it occurred to me to install Internet Explorer 8 onto my system while I was mucking around. The install caused a reboot, and then everything came to a halt.

No, not the Blue screen of death (which, truth to tell, I haven't seen in ages), but something worse -- the BLACK screen of death. The incredibly obscure error message said that some acronymy file couldn't be found -- press any key to reboot. I pressed a lot of keys, causing the same message to repeat over and over.

I decided to stop trying and waited for Robert to come home.

Turns out that my computer was set up a little oddly. It was trying to restart in this order:

1. Look on the USB ports for attached drives and use the files on the drives to restart.
2. Look in the CD drives for disks and use the files on the CD to restart.
3. Look in the hard disk in the normal place and restart.

What did it find first? The presentations on the USB drive. Not one acronymy file in sight.

My prince in shining armor rearranged the "boot order," calm was restored, and my computer resumed its usual behavior. Phew.

So why do they make things so hard? If I ran the world, that error message would have said something like "cannot find an acronymy file on USB drive 3," which would have at least sent me in the right direction. And maybe with a little more thought I could design a message that would make even more sense. How about: "Looking on USB drive 3 for [file]. Would you like me to try the CD? No? How about the hard drive?" How hard would that be? D'oh!