No Poker for Me

I came home from work last night and found that rather than displaying its usual screensaver, my old (poker) laptop had decided to show this nice blue screen with a bunch of ugly looking error messages and hex codes. Not big deal I thought. This has happened a few times recently and is part of the reason why I have started offloading important files from it, and why I moved my PokerTracker data to the postgres database on my Linux box. Its never crashed while I was using it, and I had run some diagnostics on it and not found any problems. Once I reboot it behaves normally.

This time a reboot got me some uglier looking errors. UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME can't be good for anyone can it? Luckily I've been taking regular backups and I am pretty sure that I am going to be able to recover any data that I need. I got this free backup software called Retrospect with my external hard drive, and it seems to work pretty well. I also ran a chkdsk on the old laptop and it seems to have repaired itself. I was able to boot into safe mode, but by the time the chkdsk had finished it was late and I didn't feel like dealing with it anymore.

So, I no longer have a machine to play poker on. I guess I could use my work laptop but since I don't own this one, I'd rather not install a bunch of poker software on it. Somehow I don't think my boss would approve. I could also use PokerRoom's java version of their software and play on my Linux box, but I'm not a huge fan of that option. Maybe FullTilt will come out with a Linux version soon.

On the plus side, I was planning on buying/building a new machine so this should expedite the process. Either way I'll probably be spending the next few days trying to get whatever data I can off of the laptop and onto my backup drive so I don't lose anything. Fun times.