I was going to post an “e-toy update” but now my primary PC — a one-year-old DELL Inspiron 530 — won’t start. Not even in safe mode. After running a full scan yesterday, of course. AAUGH!
So I’m on the Acer netbook. I won’t bother trying to figure out what’s wrong. I’ll just go straight to an installation of Windows.
(Later) OK…. I shall not die this day. Not yet, anyway. I ran Safe Mode so it would go to a command prompt, and I was able to launch explorer.exe (the desktop GUI interface). Running chkdsk revealed some file system problems, so I set chkdsk to run with the fix option on the next restart. Why did NTFS develop a problem? Don’t know, but I won’t ever run the Verizon system optimizer again, that’s for sure. It’s the one thing I did differently yesterday than I usually do when doing a maintenance scan.
(Later still) Well… the first restart after the last thing I wrote resulted in a BSOD with PFN_LIST_CORRUPT. So I most likely have a hard memory error, or a bad device driver. I removed the Cisco VPN and its virtual adapter, and the error hasn’t returned. But just in case I burned a bootable Microsoft Memory Test CD.