Hanging

Written message from mom: left computer froze – words mutilated so i shut off switches

I was surprised that she didn’t capitalize the i. I beamed proudly in her slow but sure online-savviness.

I have in custody two computers. The left one acted funny. I turned it on and it beeped non-stop after logging into my account. The Num/Caps/Scroll Lock keys didn’t work. I flipped the AT/XT switch underneath (anybody remember those old keyboards?) and rebooted.

This time, the keyboard played dead, but it could still load Windows.

I flipped the keyboard back to AT mode and rebooted again. This time, it didn’t beep, but MSN 4.7 came up! Bloody irritating program. I saw the MSN 6.2 icon show me as disconnected, but I appeared online to my brother (who was on the computer to the right.) MSN 4.7’s icon wasn’t in the system tray, but it was invisibly making me online.

What was weirder was that I was the only one who had administrative power to install MSN 4.7 (I thought I removed it after installing MSN 6.2…) I remember having MSN 6.2, when a “new version of MSN is out, do you want to install?” popped up. When I clicked Install and rebooted, MSN 4.7 came back up.

After removing MSN 4.7 again with this very useful guide, I rebooted. This time, it was only MSN 6.2. However, it automatically scrolled to the bottom of the list! I scrolled back up, and it went down again!

There were two possibilities – the Page Down or End key was jammed. I opened Notepad, typed some nonsensical lines, copied and pasted it so it would fill more than one page, and put the cursor at the beginning of the file. It jumped to the end of the first line (and not one page down).

I then checked Hotmail, and it hung like my mom told me. This wasn’t Hotmail though; there was obvious video corruption at the bottom.

There could be just three things wrong now:
1) 3dfx Voodoo 3 on Windows XP and bad driver support
2) 512MB 400Mhz DDR Kingston Value RAM that never really got fixed after warranty
3) my classic solid, resounding keyboard has come to its End *sniff*

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