MY COMPUTER SUCKS

Before I start out here, let it be known that I am not a super computer smarty. I read PC World, I read 2600, I read about computer shit on the internet on a daily basis. But I still manage to fuck my computer up from time to time.

So, yesterday I was fooling around on the internet whereupon I came across this list of task menu programs and what they mean. (http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm ) Reading down I see two items, IGFXTRAY and HKCMD, which are related to hotkey functions for Intel graphics chipsets. According to this website these were not needed to run at startup (and they were ok to remove,) and seeing how I've never used these particular hotkeys I thought it ok to remove them via msconfig from starting up automatically everytime you start the computer. So far, so good.

Then, everything went to hell. I got these crazy lines going through my screen, big black boxes, vertical grey columns, etc. My screen looked like shit. I assumed that putting everything back the way it was would fix the problem. It was 6:00 pm.

Five hours later and my screen was still fucked up. Here are some of the things I did (in no particular order) to try and rectify the problem:

1) I put the startup folder back the way it was

2) Manipulated the screen resolution, color depth, and hardware acceleration

3) Reinstalled the driver for my graphics card (ATI Radeon 9800 pro,) several times I might add.

4) Downloaded new drivers for the Radeon and installed those, also several times.

5) Changed about every setting there is for the graphics card, monitor, etc.

6) Rebooted in Safe mode, deleted the drivers, rebooted normally and installed them again via plug and play

7) Did the same as above but installed the drivers manually from the CD, then again manually from the download folder

8) Disabled the graphics card in device manager, rebooted, then enabled it again (this really screwed things up and lead to me having to reactivate Windows XP. Fucking Microsoft.)

9) Downloaded new drivers for the motherboard Intel graphics chipset

10) Switched monitors and switched to an old graphics card. Problem did not go away.

10) Loaded the shotgun and put it in my mouth, but the gun jammed.

11) Went on various tech forums and pleaded like a whiny bitch for someone with more computer smarts than me to see it in their heart to help me out.

By the time I had finished doing all this bullshit it was 3:30 A.M. I had just succeeded in wasting my whole day off. I was hungry, tired, and extremely pissed off. As far as I could tell from the internet was that the memory on the graphics card had somehow become corrupted, which blew ass because I didn't want to buy a whole new card just because I unchecked one little box in Msconfig. I tried to masturbate but I couldn't, just too damn angry I suppose (that was a first for me....) And through all of this shit, my screen still looked like this:

See those horizontal lines? That's actually a large improvement from how it originally looked.

So anyway, at 4:00 A.M. I finally gave up, went to sleep, and had dreams about torturing old lady midgets with a wooden cooking spoon. I woke up this morning refreshed, got myself this big caveman club with a nail in it, and prepared to scream at the computer all day again. I turned the shit on, and everything was back to normal.

All I had to do was turn the shit off, wait a few hours, and turn it back on. What the fuck? Who forgot to put that little detail in the manual? I just wasted my whole fucking day on this fucking computer, trying everything I possibly could to try and fix a problem that fixed itself in the middle of the night with no human intervention whatsoever? What the hell is going on here?

I've come to two conclusions, either (A) whoever designed this graphics card somehow put this in there as a practical joke, or (B) the ancient Cuthulu demon that inhabits my computer needs me to be close to it so it can suck out more of my soul energy and thus one day grow strong enough to free itself from it's binary prison. Or maybe it was the Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus, or some fucking script kiddie who got past my firewall somehow, or God. Who knows. All I know now is that this computer is a piece of shit and I am going to build another one, without a graphics card from ATI. Maybe I'll get a Mac.

Fuck this computer.