Apparently, I'm a victim of piracy...

Yesterday, my computer packed up. Wouldn't boot up at all, said the operating system needed reinstalling. Naturally, I spent about five hours searching for one, and when I found one I thought 'well, superb, the problems are solved'.

But they weren't. Oh no, because Windows won't install - apparently, I didn't have a hard drive installed. I started swearing to myself at this point, because I really didn't want to lose a 200 gig hard drive and everything on it, but I figured it was a bit too late to do anything about it. So I set off across the road to buy a replacement, costing a whacking £45, and then come back to install it.

But then my computer boots up fine. Completely fine, no problems with my hard drive nor my operating system. So I'm sitting there, Windows install disk in one hand and brand new £45 hard drive in the other, and my PC is working like a charm. This does not make me happy.

What makes me even less happy is that my PC keeps crashing, which I have surmised is down to it overheating. My CPU fan isn't spinning, which is probably the reason, though the heatsink is going quite nicely for hours at a time (allowing me to type this). Thing is, the fan IS working - it powers up for a good few seconds every time I start the PC, but then it just stops. I've twiddled the BIOS, I've downloaded programs to control it, but nothing works. It's all rather stupid, as I don't mind if my computer physically breaks but I get quite pissed off when it is capable of working but chooses not to.

Oh, and to make things better, Windows Update has downloaded a new patch that apparently thinks it is helpful to tell me I've been a victim of counterfeiting every 30 minutes. So that screws up whatever I'm doing every half an hour, as it alt-tabs games down, and I can't seem to dislodge that either. Even as I type this, it's done it again. Do they honestly think I don't KNOW I'm using a pirate version of Windows?

If I go quiet for a few days, either my computer has actually melted from the lack of fan action or I've thrown it out the window in a fit of rage. Either way, the computer loses. I hope it thinks about that carefully before it decides to fuck with me again.