Never never never ever, and I mean never, accidentally unplug an uncharged laptop in the middle of a Microsoft Service Pack Update. Okay, never. Got it?
This I did on Friday.
It was not a good day.
With perfect timing, the install was riddling through .dll files at the time of power interuptus. Sweet Mother Mary, that's all she wrote.
When I rebooted to attempt to pick up where I left off, I found that I was left off a cliff. My desktop wouldn't load. No icons. No status bar or start menu. Just a really nice picture of a landscape like one of those relaxation waterfall deals.
I'll save you the trouble -- save me the remembering -- of the last day, which included having to restore XP. Although I came up with a quirky workaround for copying my most important files (only one at a time--no ctrl key) over to my D: drive (I'm partitioned) using a combintion of techniques (task manager/new task/browse/click/ctrl+c/dropdown/D:/ctrl+v), I lost my email file and all my applications.
So I've been rebuilding. A little at a time. And it's safe to say that if I've ever emailed you in the past--like over the last few years--I don't know how to write to you anymore.
So, Hey. Hope all is well. Things are peachy over here.
night.
