To Quote Homer Simpson, "Praise Jebus."

I had no real concept of just how much I use my computer right up until it stopped working yesterday. At about 6:30pm yesterday I restarted my computer, it failed to boot up, and I was rudely greeted with the following error message:

"Windows can not start. The following file is missing or corrupted \windows\system\vgaoem.fon.

You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows setup using the original setup CD-ROM. Select R at the first screen to start repair"

Let me just say the use of the Recovery Console is not very intuitive. I mucked around trying to figure out how to fix this until about 9pm. At that time I took a break, went and got some food, and skipped off to the campus of the local university to apply some Google-fu to my problem. The Internet didn't fail me, and when I got home at about 10:30pm I was able to quickly replace the file. And when I restarted my computer - I got a dreaded Blue Screen of Death. My particular error was:

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

At this point I probably should have just gone back to campus and looked the damn error up on the Internet, but no - I like to do things the hard way. A few hours of frustrating tinkering later I came across a repair installation option in the Windows Setup. I gave it a go, and at approximately 2:30am I restarted the computer, and wonder of wonders it successfully rebooted.

Except it wasn't finding the drivers for my video card. Well no problem, I downloaded the latest drivers from the Internet, installed them, restarted my computer, and the drivers were still not found. Still not a problem, I uninstalled the drivers, grabbed the CD-ROM that came with my video card, restarted my computer, the video card was detected, I installed the drivers from the CD-ROM, I restarted my computer, and the drivers were not found. I spent another three hours trying different variations of uninstalling, and reinstalling the drivers from both the CD-ROM, and the most recent version from the Internet, and I became quite intimate with both Windows' Device Manager, and Hardware Updater. My success was sadly limited. Eventually I got the computer to stay at the screen resolution I like, once I even got the video card to run WoW, but after every restart I was back to where I started which was namely one of the following two errors showing up for my video card in the Device Manager:

This device is not configured correctly. (Code 1)

This device cannot start. (Code 10)

I finally went to bed somewhere in the neighborhood of 5:30am. I woke up again at 9:30am, and continued my fruitless attempts at successfully reinstalling the drivers for my video card. I started contemplating trying to reinstall my old video card, I also pondered the possibility of buying a new video card, and finally my line of thought centered on trying to reinstall Windows XP. I started looking up information on what would be involved with such an undertaking, which quickly evolved into a search for how I'm going to back up the files I really don't want to loose (and cannot easily replace). This finally brought my attention to the System Restore function of Windows. This seemed like a pretty good thing to try before doing something as drastic as trying to reinstall Windows, so I gave it a go, and at 1pm exactly the process was completed, and it worked. My computer lives again, my video card functions, video files once again play on my computer, WoW successfully runs, dog chase cats, cars, and bark at mailmen, and life as I know it has returned to normal.

I repeat the words of Homer Simpson, "Praise Jebus."