One thing that takes the sting out of today's events is watching a documentary about soldiers on the Maginot Line.

We've got it pretty cushy.

Keep digging. You may find a punch card.

@kdfrawg There is absolutely nothing wrong with this machine. This is the frustrating part. Just something that went awry in Windows.

I thought we left WinRot behind in 9x. Guess I thought wrong.

Good on Microsoft for making office license management easy, at least. grumble

Now for the humorous part. I was looking to clean a bunch of crap off that system but kept putting it off.

Squeaky clean now.

It's hard to believe how much of our lives we put on those things.

Very glad I keep the most important things on Virtual machines.

Attempting factory restore. Don't know what else to do. Fortunately, all the edits to the code were pushed to the repo. Some docs and pictures not backed up but I keep most things in Dropbox anyway so "yay" I guess.

@kdfrawg Booting under a Linux rescue CD shows my there are no SMART errors registered. Windows' disk check tools report no errors. Boots under safe mode. No recovery options work. They all fail.

Screwed.

There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made.

I'm screwed