That would be me.

I'd get to the "WIndows" startup screen with the blue Cylon/K.I.T.T. light, and it just sat there.

I had to run a system-restore on my bugbox weekend before last. Used the old Win2k box to post about the crash, but no kamikaze squirrels in my tale of woe.

I think you win.

Some things never change, I guess. Aeons ago, running low on disk space on my fabulous IBM XT with 640K of RAM and a 20meg HD, I decided to try that newfangled 'Doublespace' that MS offered on DOS 5. Backed up on about 15 disks, started it. There was a warning not to interrupt the process or all data would be lost. Estimated time counter started. 37 minutes. Kept an eye on it until 3 minutes to go, and there was a loud BOOM in the neighborhood. Power went off.

2 hours later, Georgia Power reported that the wind had twisted the trunk at the end of the street, shorting it out.

So here we go... reformat, install PC Tools, try Doublespace again, insert Disk 1...

Oh well, I guess I didn't have anything better to do.

Gawd, I remember DBLSPACE. I even tried it once. The actual compression ratio never even came close to "doubling" available disk space, and if I remember correctly you had to "mount" the compressed data before it could be accessed, and if anything went wrong with that you were in trouble.

And running DEFRAG on it was utterly surreal. I finally just identified a bunch of data I didn't need on the hard drive, copied it onto floppies, and un-DBLSPACE'd the dang thing.

Then I took the backed-up data off the floppies, PKZIP'd it, and put some of it back on floppies.
That worked much better.

Of course, along came Windows 95 and some outfit came up with on-the-fly compression for individual files, which I used for a while -- but these days with 180-gig hard drives (mine is about 15% full) who needs compression anymore?

Three letters to burn into your forehead, Jay: U P S.

Never do anything important on a PC without one. Or sooner or later, the power gremlins will getcha.

Then, halfway through another piece, SOMEONE thought it would be funny to have a squirrel go into an electrical substation and fricasee himself, plunging me and about 2,000 of my neighbors into darkness -- and sentencing my posting to The Great Beyond.

Not to mention the poor squirrel.

McGhee said Gawd, I remember DBLSPACE. I even tried it once.

Yea all that is true. Remember that MS lost a patent infringment case and had to change the code. It became DriveSpace. Tried both, they worked OK. But that was back in the day when hard drives were about $10 a meg, not 5¢ a gig like they are today. ;->