Today I will mostly be backing up my work pc after a spectacular crash yesterday my supposedly stable and 'professional' windows 2000 (regularly patched and up to date) workstation went totally nuts trying to load a png graphic in The Gimp.
Now if it was just the gimp that crashed I wouldn't mind, but instead Gimp carries on running while the rest of the system collapsed around it - the whole GUI went haywire with window widgets, bevels, etc disappearing, then the startbar redrawing itself all over the place, finally the whole GUI was flashing random old screen artifacts and still not reacting to the three-finger-salute. I had to power-cycle the machine to stop it.
On rebooting the system couldn't find the keyboard so I had to reboot again (powercycling yet again).
Finally I was able to get to the login screen but my account was no longer recognised. I found out that not only was the local account info mangled, the registry and all the system settings corrupted, but also the Active Directory system no longer had my account in it.
I really really really hate working with this kind of crap.
On the plus side however - I am setting up our 2nd linux machine (first was a couple of months ago now) in the office, to act as development for the live server. It was also be used for R&D and I get to use a machine that is halfway reliable for some of my work.
