After reformating my hard drive and restalling Windows, I spent a lot of the weekend reinstalling software. I finished about noon on Sunday. Windows blue-screened about 3. This time, however, I was at the computer when it happened and saw what application took it down. Knowing that gives me some ideas on how I can avoid further crashes.

This time, I managed to recover using the back-up. I still have to reinstall everything, but it shouldn't take as long. I also got smart and made a folder for the programs to install drivers and software so I don't have to keep downloading them. I also bought an external hard drive large enough to back up my entire HD.

I started the back-up about 10:00 last night. When I left for work this morning about 6, it was about 1/3 of the way done.