There was something wrong with some temporary files that caused the C drive to fill up. Then the laptop crashed via the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). I went to start it back up, crashed during start up that time. Booted it up again and it went into Start-Up Repair mode (as expected). It tried to solve a problem, but couldn't. Not a problem I thought, I have an image of the C drive backed up on my external hard drive. I'd lose most of my installed programs, but that's not a problem. I tried to restore from that image file. Things were going well until the laptop crashed again during the recovery. As it was in the process of essentially deleting and reinstalling Windows files, there are now some serious problems with the laptop and it won't ever let me get to the point where I can try to restore from my external again.
No problem I thought, I have one month left on my warranty. I'll just take it down to the shop and they'll fix it. I went down to Tottenham Court Rd. The shop was shut. Like closed. Gone. Extinct. Bugger. I thought it'd be ok; Toshiba should still honour the warranty. I rang them that night to be told that their warranty only covers the hardware and as this was a software problem, I was on my own. Well not quite, they offered to pass my through to their Virgin Digital Help who would help me repair my laptop for a £50 fee. Grudgingly, I agreed.
Forty-five minutes, two escalations and lots of restarting later, the technicians there admitted they couldn't help me. They advised me that I should get a CD version of Windows 7 and boot up the laptop using that rather than using the hard drive. As I had spent the time they wasted reading the laptop's manual in detail, I had already come to that conclusion myself. So I'm now hunting for a copy of Windows 7 Home edition to use for the repair. No-one in work has one and my sister's leads are coming up cold. The disks are expensive so I preferred not to spend money on them.
The next idea I had was to use someone else's computer to torrent and burn the necessary disks. I cycled five miles to the Old Kent Road in the pouring rain, and slept on a couch while waiting for the 3GB installation disk to download. I burned it and put it into the laptop.... Nothing. I shouldn't have been surprised; the CD drive had been having problems of its own of late too. I had nothing to do but cycle back home. Again I was a victim of pathetic fallacy as the heavens opened up and I got drenched on my return.
So this Monday, I did the the unthinkable. I gave up. I had reached the point where I realised that proper professional help was needed. I dropped the laptop off to a repair shop, got a quote and returned a couple of days later. It's working now, but it'd have been much more satisfying had I fixed it myself. Oh well. I tried, valiantly. Plus, there's always that CD drive still to fix... I think I'll let Toshiba and my (hopefully still valid) warranty handle that.
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