BSOD. Blue Screen of Death. It can turn a valuable computer into a boat anchor. The BSOD can turn a Joshua into a Doubting Thomas. It tries the faith. It is not for the faint of heart.

     Windows apparently did an update last night, which caused a problem with my ministry laptop.

      There it was in all its glory this morning to welcome me to the new day. Eleven hours ago. A present from the liberals in Silicon Valley, the trump hating, God hating, liberals that I am sure targeted me personally to destroy my productive day!

     Okay – so maybe I am overreacting a bit. But Satan can and will use things like this to try and get the better of us and the fact the people supplying these products are antagonistic to the Gospel doesn’t make it easier to swallow when something like the BSOD happens.

     So – I spent 11 hours (intermittently I was able to do some other things in between) trying to get my 1 ½ year old ministry Laptop back to the land of the living.

     The actual BSOD was caused by a free version of what, up until now had been an excellent Antivirus program. AVAST. If you are running AVAST, here is a heads up for you. If you are running Windows 10, and are not very technical, you would have been up the creek.  In the past Windows would allow you to do a “SAFE” boot to start the computer.  Windows 10 requires you to get into the Windows to do that.

     I have a restore disk on a USB drive, which I used to get into the computer. The game plan was to go to a restore point prior to yesterday, do the restore, remove Avast, and let nature take its course. That’s when I found that somewhere along the way, Windows 10 had decided to stop making restore points prior to doing updates! Not sure when Windows has stopped making these restore points, but the laptop had NONE!  My other PCs do have restore points on them.

     I was able to drop to a command prompt (DOS prompt), find and delete the system file that was causing the BSOD about 7 hours ago. I thought I was home free. I was not.

     When Windows 10 came back up The Network card was not connecting to the Network. I had no access to my Network drives or the Internet.

     James 1:2-3  My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations;  Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.

     Oh boy was I working on patience! I ended up trying everything from reinstalling the network card, to installing new drivers, typing in all sorts of IP commands to no avail. I was finally about to give up and leave everything until tomorrow, when I was going to take the laptop to the gun range and use it  for target practice. On a whim, I tried reconnecting to our wireless network (I use a wired network here) when the wired and wireless networks both came up. Everything started working. Praise God.

     I wasted 11 hours working on it today, but… again, it gave me an opportunity to make sure my processes are in place, to make sure I have backups (I do), share with you some things to be on the lookout for, and how to get out of trouble when it comes looking for you (it will).

     I pray you do NOT have to go through things like this!