Random afternoon

My workstation at work had been making more annoying noise than usual lately: I thought it was just dust in the fan, but the computer guy thought hard drive bearings. He was right; in fact, when he broke it down it turned out that the internal RAID had lost or was in the process of losing two out of six segments. Fortunately one of them was the empty hot spare, so I haven't lost any data, but that was a closer call than I like.

There was a roadrunner scurrying around in the bushes outside the office window this afternoon, which was unexpected; the university corridor is usually thought to be too urban for them, and this isn't exactly a quiet week on campus. I didn't manage to get the camera out in time, sadly.

My application for the free upgrade to Windows 7 for the new laptop has been approved. I ordered the cheap upgrade for the desktop when it was offered, too, so by November I should be a Vista-free household again.


Edit: AAARGH!

New laptop downloaded updates, wanted to reboot. Fell over. Fell over again. In safe mode now -- and me without a clue what to do next, if CHKDSK doesn't help. Not what I wanted to do this evening ...

Update

After much messing around -- note: Safe Mode with Command Prompt is not the way to go! -- the laptop system is back to where it was before the fatal update, but minus 50Mb of antivirus updates. Which it is now downloading, slowly. (I just hope that was the problem. Having it fall over repeatedly *in safe mode* does not inspire confidence, but I'm no Microsoft Engineer. The last time I had a Windows machine go unstable on me like that it was a dead hard drive, but this doesn't seem to be that.)

Update to the update: Googling around finds a couple of other people who got trouble with the latest batch of updates for Vista 64. I rather suspect that the culprit is kb973879, which is supposed to be a fix for multi-processor systems (with bad BIOS?) blue-screening when installing Vista SP2. Slightly bizarrely, the only one in the batch that's labeled "important" is a daylight-saving-time update that appears to apply to Egypt.