T______________T

I knew it was coming, I had just hoped it would be somewhere a lot farther down the line.

My brother had this idea to do some stupid shit with "a really cool program that lets you do stuff with your phone", and I, feigning interest, let him do as he wished. This "program" dealt such destruction to my computer's hard drive that even with every process killed I still had a 5-minute delay between closing a window and actually seeing it closed. After this I was forced to do the one thing I haven't done in months:

I restarted.

In Safe Mode.

When Ad-Aware and Spybot found nothing amiss, I knew the trouble had to lie elsewhere. And most unfortunately, that elsewhere could only be a vital system component.

I restarted.

Windows could not restart because the following file is missing
or corrupt:
\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

You can attempt to repair this file be starting Windows Setup
using the original Setup CD-ROM.
Select 'r' at the first screen to start repair.

This, I gather, is an ill omen; a black spot; a grim, that my machine's life was a-stutter and is now nearing its timely demise. It's as though it has suffered a crippling injury and now sits as a vegetable on my desk.

And in my grief, I expect my own life to change. How this will affect my social and private lives, I do not yet know. To be sure, my time online will now decrease. Hell, I may even start reading again. But there will always be a void where once I had that delightful piece of technology.

RIP 72.66.86.208, 2002-2006.