You've Been Vista'd

Apologies in advance if things go quiet here for a while but Vista just upped and bit me.

Last night my laptop started to auto-download an update. From what I saw it was around 50 mb in size and seemed to be something like .Net 3.5-linked. I decided to leave it to its own devices and went to bed.

Next morning, I was greeted by a blank, dark screen with nothing except a grey underscore cursor at the top left. None of the keys did anything so the only option was to power off and reboot.

All seemed well. Vista came up and reported it was completing "step 3 of 3", going from 0% to 99% done. And then ... it shut down and started a reboot cycle, which was pretty much all I could get out of it for the next hour. Always the same thing: installing step 3, 99% complete, reboot. Starting in safe mode made no difference. Shutting power off made no difference. Swearing, cussing and cursing Balmer made no difference either, though it did make me feel slightly better.

I'm leaving on a trip Monday morning so I just had to leave it for our IT guy to poke at next week and grab a spare in order to read mail via Outlook's web access feature. Therefore, I'll just take my PDA on the road with me and hence won't have much in the way of options for blogging.

Normal service, as they say, will be resumed as soon as possible.