Near-Death Experience

What happened last night was almost like deja-vu. I’ll tell you why, but first I want to remind you computer buffs of the ‘Blue Screen of Death’. Do you remember those? I have had a few over the last thirty-five years. For those who don’t know them – the few lucky ones – it is when your computer is about to give up the ghost. Usually, you get a couple of them that you can recover from, if you are lucky – like heart attacks, but each occurrence is a near death experience – a harbinger of certain doom.

I don’t know whether those blue screens still exist in Windows 10, but I had something very scaringly similar last night. My computer rebooted without warning, took ten minutes to reload and then only with an error message, which read something like, ‘Start Menu and Cortana have stopped working’. I can tell you that my heart sank.

Anyway, here is how I recovered from it. Do not go looking for mor information at Microsoft, which will tell you to right-click the Start Menu, despite the fact that the error message says that it is not working – a stunningly pathetic example of an idiot who doesn’t know what he/she is talking about.

Instead, load another browser, I use FireFox, so I loaded Chrome and searched from there. I could do most things but not through the normal channels. Anyway, someone recommended rebooting until Windows did work, but also staying online. It took me three reboots before I heard the Windows jingle. I was a happy man again.

However, I am taking it seriously and very happy not to have lost our website. My laptop is three years old, and so I will change it soon. Three is not old, but maybe it is for an Asus – this is my first one.

The reason why it seems timely is because I have just finished writing a book about a human near-death experience called A Night in Annwn, which is the book with the cover above.

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Near-Death Experience