Damn you to (computer) hell

My computer is dying.

This is the computer that, when I first bought it, had what seemed like an obscene amount of power and more memory than I could ever possibly use no matter how technology might evolve or advance. The one that would never become obsolete because it came with every bell and whistle ever known to man (aside from the CD burner because, seriously, the zip drive is the wave of the future and no one is *ever* going to need a CD burner).

This is the computer that was going to last me forever because I wasn't going to download anything that might infect it or otherwise fuck it up. The one that I protected with the *paid* versions of the top firewall, antivirus, and spyware programs. The one where I had cookies disabled and pop-up ads blocked ... at least until I got annoyed at how I kept having to enter my user name and password to get into my favorite sites.

Fat lot of good it did me.

Now my computer randomly fails to respond when I try to open various programs. It freaks out if I try to open more than one browser window or run two programs at once. I get the big blue screen of death every time I try to close out of a program.

The computer refuses to shut down or restart the proper way under any circumstances. Which is particularly annoying since I need to restart it at least 100 times a day.

In fact, it stalls and freezes so frequently that I don't even bother waiting to see if the system will stop being busy waiting for the close program dialog box to display. I control-alt-delete first, ask questions later. And if control-alt-delete doesn't work in a second or two, I just punch the reset button, hope I remembered to save whatever I was doing, and pray it's not the last time my computer comes back to life.

Stupid computer.

What really freaks me out is the fact that I've got almost all of my pictures stored on my hard drive. And, with no CD burner, I have no practical way to back them up or move them to a new system (amazing zip drive of the future notwithstanding).

I've got lots of writing on my hard drive, too, but word documents can always be e-mailed as an attachment to myself or transferred to floppy discs. That's assuming they're still making computers with floppy disc drives these days. Are they? No, don't tell me -- I don't want to know. Anyway, much of the writing on my computer is crap that can be safely deleted or printed out and filed away in a cardboard box in the back of a closet.

Actually, come to think of it, my photos could probably use a good weeding out, too.

Anyway, I tried running a registry cleaner. Like I said, I've got a good spyware detector. If any techies out there have any other suggestions, I'm happy to hear them. Otherwise, it looks like I'm going to be shopping for a new one ... and yet another line of credit.