Declared bankruptcy, went looking for a buyer, got bought for a song by a smallish company in CO. They started hiring all the Plasmon people. Old service contracts were terminated, had to buy new ones. Long term prognosis is fuzzy. [link]

I think Hybrids will morph into plugin hybrids. As batteries come down, they will still be too expensive to make cars with 200+ mile ranges. So they will make cars that can travel between 60 to 100 miles on the battery. That will take care of most peoples driving most days (though not all). So most days most people plug in their car at night charging it while they sleep (like a cell phone). Traveling farther than your electric charge will carry you? Stop i a gas station and fill up the gas tank. In the beginning these will be limited to people with assigned parking or carports or garages where they can install dryer plugs. IF they become popular, eventually street parking will have charging meters that accept credit/debit cards.

Aha, duh, I have Windows XP Media Center Edition. And the fact that SFC asks for a "Pro CD2" is a weird bug. I wonder if there's a way to get Media Center discs. The XP Pro and XP Pro SP2 discs didn't work. There's supposed to be a registry hack you can do to make SFC look somewhere else (where you copy the I386 folder from the disc), but I'm not sure how different the DLL files are in the editions. I compared the ones on the XP Pro disc to what's in my WindowsI386 folder, and several are different sizes. So I don't know if it will cause even more problems if I let SFC use those files to replace whatever it's found.

Strangely enough, I checked Event Viewer and found the application errors for Paint and IrfanViewer...and they were both for libmplayer.dll. But when I searched for that file, it was only present in some codec folders; it's an ffdshow file. It's not in I386 with the other Windows DLL files (and thus wouldn't be on an XP disc). I don't know why they'd be using that file. The Outlook Express error and Explorer error didn't show up in Event Viewer, so I couldn't confirm that it's all the same DLL. This is so weird. But SFC has found five DLL files it wants to replace. I wish it would just tell me what they were! And where to frakking get them.

Right now I'm just dealing and adapting because everything else works fine until I find another program that's affected. This computer will be three years old this fall, so maybe it's time to get a new one anyway.

MOTHERFUCK. Now if I try to open a Windows Media Player file or even open the program, I get this error:

The file wmp.dll has a version number of 10.0.0.3646 where 10.0.0.4058 was expected.

Windows Media Player is not installed properly and must be reinstalled.

I wonder if SFC incorrectly replaced that file because WMP was working fine a few days ago. GAH. At least that problem may be fixed if I just reinstall. I don't like WMP 11, though, but I think I can just install that correctly and then roll it back a version easily.

Media Center is weird. The program I work with isn't supported on Media Center because of problems with SQL.

Best option is dust off and nuke it from orbit. Seriously.

I can't deal with that kind of stress right now! Of course, I don't think there's ever a good time for that sort of thing.

One thing. Since it still boots and runs, MAKE BACKUPS OF ALL IMPORTANT DATA! KEEP THEM UP TO DATE. When you have known problems on a machine, back up your documents, photos, movies, music anything like that. Anything you have created. Anything you have collected. If your time is worth anything your data is worth more than anything else on your computers. But then back up applications too to the extent you are able.

I mean everyone should do this all the time. But when you have a machine with problems and it is not yet unbootable.Backup! You will kick yourself if you don'T.

Oh yeah, I already backed up. I hadn't backed up in six months!

Oh yeah. Backups. ALL Hard drives will ALL eventually die, some sooner than later. And then there are other problems, like OS failures and virus attacks, et cetera.

If Spike is right and I have to start reading e-books on an iPhone after using both a Kindle 1 and Kindle 2, I will be incredibly sad. By which I mean, I will simply have to go back to normal old books.