ITS ALIVE!

Finally! I managed to get my system up an running again! Hurrah for helpful friends and wise people on the net who create bootCDs for you to fiddle with your system with after the worst has happened.

Some things I have learned:

Windows can be really picky and stupid if your config files don't match exactly what it wants

I probably shouldn't have bothered backing everything up, because despite "imminent failure warnings, everything seems to be working fine on my end right now.

I think I reduce disk read error if I orientate my HD vertically - ie if I hold my laptop such that its at 90 degrees to the way its supposed to face. When I did that for a while (and did a lot of disk access - after all, you need to do disk access to back up a harddisk, right?), the alignment issue corrected itself.



Other good news: I managed to sign up for OR 221! Huzzah! Had to drop the hyper-impacted E190 to do it, though, so there's about zero chance of doing E190 next semester. Oh well, there's always the semester after, or Summer.

Also, whacked out my OR 162 project in double-quick time. Hooray for shell scripting in AMPL and other "working" languages. Yes it took the computer 5 minutes to do all 10000 iterations, but do I look like I care? *grin* At least I didn't have to type up all those iterations on my own!