I don't know how this happened. I manually run Windows Update when I decide I want to. However, Monday night, Windows Update somehow circumvented my settings and did an update. My thoughts were nothing more than an "oh, damn, well that's alright I guess. So I returned from classes Tuesday night to find my computer had frozen. I did a quick reboot. About 60 seconds after it got to the Desktop, it freezes again. This time I boot to Safe Mode with Networking because this shouldn't be happening. Safe Mode works fine so I begin searching for help on my laptop.

First thing I try is disabling third party startup services. This doesn't work, meaning something is broken in the Microsoft startup services. From here, I forget exactly what I did but it resulted in me using System Restore to undo my updates. I do it, it seems to work ok. Then I next discover that I cannot access a majority of my Control Panel options. I search around a little more and signs point to user profile corruption. Looking around more gives me a command prompt fix I can do, so I run it. it finds corruption and fixes it, recommends restart, I hit restart.

THIS WAS A BAD IDEA. Turns out that in the restore, Windows had kept the option to automatically install updates checked. This means that by restarting, I caused the computer to re-install the updates I had just undone with the Restore. Square one. Except it seemed to be working ok. It booted normally and didn't freeze. I'm feeling okay so I go to bed because it was 1am.

Next morning I wake up and find it's frozen once more. I say fuck it and turn the thing off, go to class, will deal with at night. I get back that night to deal with it and start talking to a friend. He tells me to stop fucking around and let him help. We go into Safe Mode and he remote desktops into my computer to see if he can fix anything. Long story short, we tried a bunch of stuff and none of it had much effect, stumping both of us. His last suggestion was to run a Kapersky Rescue Disc virus scan overnight and see if it turned up anything bad. If it did, that would be a starting point. If not, a reformat and reinstall would be necessary because this shit is eluding us.

Didn't check this morning because I didn't care enough. Came home tonight to find it hadn't found anything. Last resort time. So I've just spent the last three or four hours backing up all my stuff (minus most of my Steam library because meh I can redownload) and reinstalling everything. I've just finished with the basic drivers and such for my graphics card, motherboard and network card, just installed antivirus and Opera as well. Gotta go through the mental checklist of other programs to install now and also start transferring everything off of my external drives.

What a pain in the ass.

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