Had to reformat and reinstall everything.

[Brian37]

I learned computers the hard way, first with towers. Now with laptops, which I railed against having because everything is integrated at first. But now laptops are pretty much self fixing unlike old towers where you would have to load in disks or CD drives. Mine was pretty much reformated and reinstalled online. It did most of the work itself. 

I do know this. I wish I knew what I know now about computers 30 years ago, I could have made a real living fixing them knowing what I know now. But I was so intimidated by the technology back then and felt dumb about everything. I did almost wait until the morning to bring it in to at tech, but I got tired of paying each time and said "fuck it, if it is gone, I'll buy a new one". I got lucky. 

I guess some bug got into a critical part of the startup. But as long as the hard drive and cpu are fine, and it is only a software issue, you can always uninstall and reinstall. Fact is, my computer is running even better than before this happened. It is like having a clean chalkboard with very little writing on it.