I am the most computer-literate person in the "girls' lab", which is to say that I have used both apples and PCs without feeling daunted by the differences, I know how to load virus scanning software, update it and run the virus scan, and if your stuff isn't printing I might be able to get it to print (usually by turning either the printer or your computer off and back on). I'm the woman who gets asked to fix random computer stuff because I evidently look like I know what I'm doing. Possibly because I have dated a computer science major, had two highly computer literate roommates and am living with a network systems instructor...So I recognize a lot of the jargon even if I can't really use it myself.

It's all an act though, because on Monday night I killed my home PC to the point of no return by downloading a Windows Update and installing it, then restarting my computer as it told me to do. This should not be a damaging process, the restart is just to complete the installation. Only it didn't restart, it shut down, tried to restart and then gave me a black screen with the message "NTLDR Missing Press any key to restart".

I pressed a key: NTLDR Missing Press any key to restart.

I pressed a different key:NTLDR Missing Press any key to restart.

I panicked. I pressed a third key repeatedly.

NTLDR Missing
Press any key to restart

NTLDR Missing
Press any key to restart

NTLDR Missing
Press any key to restart

NTLDR Missing
Press any key to restart

I tried the trusty [cntrl] [alt] [delete] , and it came back to the same black screen and the same message. At this point I decided it might be a good idea if I knew what the message meant, so I asked my friend Marc, who was visiting, he told me it's part of the boot drive, which is the part that starts up your computer and gets the operating system going, anything wrong with that part is not a good sign. We tried powering down, unplugging for a minute, and starting it back up again. No joy. We tried F8, F10, and F4, both holding them down and tapping them quickly while restarting. Still no joy.

I called HP support, unplugged all unnecessary peripherals from the box and tried the F10 tapping thing again. I was told that since that didn't work we would have to do a "destructive reload", which means wiping my hard drive and reloading windows and all the programs, but loosing whatever files I already had on the computer. Like the photographs we took on my birthday. Not acceptable. I asked some more technical questions to make it obvious I wasn't a complete tech-idiot and was told that I could physically remove the hard drive, take it to another desk top and slave it to that computer's hard drive to retrieve the files.

I called Bob, woke him up and spouted a lot of techie jargon at him, some of which I understood, essentially asking if I could open his box and plug my hard drive into it to save some files, and by the way did he want a free colour printer?

At this point Matt was already home and he decided he'd have a go at fixing the computer, which seemed pretty pointless since we'd tried everything already.

He had it running again inside about 40 seconds. All he did was remove the floppy disk from the disk drive and start the machine up again.

D'OH!

I had looked at the disk drive to see if there was something in it, and since the disk was black and label-less I hadn't seen it. I didn't think to push the eject button anyway. Just in case.

So...I may be the most computer literate person in my lab, but I think that's more indicative of the fact that my lab is in serious trouble if anything really does go wrong than it is of my computer-tech prowess.