Reset, Reset, Reset

     So here I sit, watching the the screen as the little circle of dots goes through its motions. Somewhere in the time between powering down two nights ago and booting tonight, My computer went brain dead.
     What I found surprising wasn't the crash itself, but there was no blue screen of death. Just a screen announcing Windows has failed to start and offering options. It seemed kind of silly to have and option to continue to Windows when it just crashed. I gave it a click just for grins. Nope. No joy, just another crash.
     Back to the menu of options. Now for someone like me, the advanced options button is like giving a kid a Zippo and telling him not to start a fire. I decided on clicking the reset button and letting it reinstall itself. It's cruising along at a snail's pace, but it'll get there eventually. My hope is it'll actually start and I can just get on with my night. If it doesn't, I may just have to click that advanced button and see what havoc I can unleash while rooting around in this thing's brain.
     It's looking good so far. The actual installation screen is up and it's at cranking away. Dammit! The first unexpected error! The process is restarting. If it fails again, I may have to break out the Windows 8 discs and take a step or two back. I'm cool with that. Win8's stable, simple and gets the job done.
     So far, it's gone from changes, to undoing changes, to redoing changes to, holy shit! A start screen! Nope. Automatic repair now. Pulling the internal network card I added may have caused the crash. Let's see what happens. Yeah, that didn't do much. Hello system restore. Good-bye updates.
   I have a feeling this restoration is just an animation to keep me occupied. Twenty minutes in, and we still have the sliding green bar. And my wife calls me impatient. Right. Oh joy! "Finalizing file restore", and another sliding green bar. I'l be seeing that damned thing in my sleep. So in a little under two hours total time, it's finally finished. Rebooting, and... and... wait for it...wait for it...IT'S ALIVE! MWUAAHAHAHAHAA! Sadly, no lightning or other Frankensteinian stuff.
    Now, let's see why the network adapter's such a bandwidth hog...