Computer Rage

Following on with the subject of football, I couldn't hear any of the commentary of the Bradford-Accrington game this Saturday....it appears on my trip home I (or perhaps Heathrow Airport's wireless internet on the way back) have somehow corrupted either Internet Exploder or Windows Media Player. My emails back-and-forth to the technical support on the website concerned have ended at "you'll need to uninstall Windows Media Player". Can I just quote said IT support people this paraphrased passage from Microsoft's own website

"Windows Media Player is embedded in the Vista operating system and cannot
(like Internet Exploder) be removed from your computer".

Thanks for that, useful IT support people. It took at least ten seconds googling to find the answer on the Microsoft website. I told them I was running Vista. I am reminded of the really irritating, nasal sounding guy on The IT Crowd who would answer every call with "have you tried turning it off and on again?"

So I am faced with restoring the factory defaults on my computer, involving backing up almost 3 GB worth of iTunes files, 2GB of photos and almost 1 GB of work related palaver. This will return it to the state in which I received it from the Dell factory but will erase everything else bar the initial setup. That'll mean losing the new Kaiser Chiefs album but that's not a bad thing.

I would have done it tonight but for the fact I can't find my USB stick anywhere to back everything up up. and I wasn't sure whether I would exceed the capacity on it anyway. The choice at London Drugs was also not terribly value-for-money. That and I am terrified that what happened to my last laptop when I tried to do the same thing - instant, catastrophic death complete with blue-screen of terminal expiration - will happen again. I can't afford to replace them on a yearly basis.

Somewhere out there, my PC-hating, Mac-loving boss would be chuckling if he could read this....