The Hotdog Laserhouse

This is basically what I am going through right now.

Imagine something for me. Imagine that every 6-14 months, something goes wrong with your computer, and every single time you think you have it beaten, either the problem persists or a new problem pops up. You get replacement motherboards, power supplies, processors, RAM and HDDs. Sometimes, you even get multiples of each, thinking your brand new hardware must be the problem.

Now imagine this has been happening with regularity since 2007.

This is my way of saying that I am at my wits end. Today, for the first time in nearly two weeks, Windows told me that yes, there is still a NTFS file system error. There is still data corruption, somewhere. I thought it was a bad system restore point and I’d cleared it all out, but nope, it’s still there. It started when I noticed Windows was running a little slowly a few hours ago - certain menus were taking too long to fold open, among other minor little things that were bugging me.

I run chkdsk and my heart sinks when it apparently finds some index errors. It tells me to run chkdsk /f and reboot so they can be fixed. Before I do that, I run HD Tune again and do a quick scan of my HDD. Everything comes up green. All of the HDD’s stats are way above the error threshold. It is healthy. So I google these index errors and I find a few people suggesting a virus scanner. I normally run Microsoft Security Essentials, but I temporarily disable it to install and run MalwareBytes. Though MalwareBytes tells me I am not infected, it does trigger Windows to give me that dreaded

[ ERROR: 55 ] [ TYPE: NTFS ]

The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:.

Which I literally just did. I figure when MalwareBytes looked through every file on the entire HDD, it must’ve scanned over the corrupt part of the file system and drew Windows’ attention to it. I reboot, chkdsk does its thing, but running it again just now and it’s telling me that I need to run chkdsk /f yet again.

I am getting very mixed messages here as to what exactly is wrong. The computer is literally telling me, “I’m fine, except for that catastrophic failure I have.” But what is it? Is it hardware? Is it software? I don’t know anymore. All I get are suggestions, but no answers. Suggestions cost money I don’t have.

I am being told by some to just buy a new computer. With what? It’s going to take me more than a month just to save up for a new HDD, what with prices as they are and everything else I need to give my money to. Also keep in mind that this almost is a new computer. The processor, PSU, graphics card and both HDDs are basically brand new - with the exception of this new Samsung HDD, all of the other stuff was installed in April or June 2011.

Frustration doesn’t even begin to cover what I’m feeling right now. I am seriously considering how more stress free my life would be without any computers at all. I’d probably be a bit healthier, that’s for sure.

And if you’re tired of hearing me bitch about my computer problems, realize that I’m tired of having reasons to bitch.