I turned on my laptop this morning and it just BSOD on me.  What the fuck?
 
The error was something about corrupted or missing SYSTEM / SOFTWARE crap and straight up did not let Windows load.  I looked around online for solutions and found that this problem wasn't uncommon with XP users.  Unfortunately, like all online solutions, none of the methods I found on the Web fixed this for me.  Fortunately, I'm only taking one summer course this semester and it's the weekend right now so it's not like the end of the world (unlike that other time when this same laptop died 2 days before a paper was due, and I didn't backup shit).  After 3 hours of dicking around with the damn thing, I kind of gave up again (much like what happened during the whole STEAM/TF2 thing, see previous blog post) and formatted the HDD.  I had luckily backed up my important stuff this time around so formatting wasn't a huge loss to me.  Still, getting all the apps and games reinstalled is going to be a pain in the ass.  As of this post, I've finished updating Windows to the most recent patches.
 
What annoys me is the fact that it died on me without any sort of warning.  The laptop was working fine last night and there hasn't been any software updates recently, either.  The only exception is Kaspersky's regular database updates, but I just can't see how that would completely cripple the OS.
 
This whole thing sucked donkey balls.