During the LSU-Florida game this evening, right around the time it became apparrent that the Tigers were not going to come from behind and win as seems to be their preferred way of doing things, my laptop froze up.  I was working on a new website for the Shreveport .NET User Group using the new MVC framework (plus Dynamic Data for CRUD operations), and I was testing on my local machine with Chrome, and when I tried to open a new tab at one point, everything screeched to a halt.

 "No problem," I thought.  "This has happened before."  I am a Windows user, after all.   So I forced a hard shutdown, and booted back up.  After I logged on, everything seemed to start up fine, but when I clicked on a link in my quick launch, everything froze up again.  After I repeated this process several times with the same results, I acknowledged that there might be something genuinely wrong here.  Booting up in Safe Mode, I tried doing a chkdsk, then a System Restore.  Neither seemed to fix the problem. 

I was beginning to suspect a hardware problem (which there might actually yet be, the jury's still out), but I did notice that things seemed to work fine in Safe Mode.  "Well," I thought, "things were starting to feel a little cluttered anyway."  So, I bit the bullet and copied Rachel's and my User directories to an external hard drive and began the repave.

As I sit and watch the Windows install screen, I pray to the Hardware gods that they might be merciful to me and my laptop, and that all my trials may be Software Related.  Please join me in my supplication.