The answer was a big no. The thing wouldn’t start again. It would get to a file called “mup.sys” and just utterly fail. No amount of fiddling would stop this file crashing the machine. Looking into mup.sys it seems to be a resource controller file, so I can only assume that whatever it was controlling was corrupt. It has taken me 2 days to get the thing back into working order as I had to make sure I have backed up all of my files. It’s still a pain in the posterior.

I like Microsoft, I think they do a pretty good job, and their usability is quite good as well. But why can’t they make an operating system that doesn’t need a full reinstall ever 6 months? It’s getting a bit annoying really. I have tried to move over to Linux (I have SUSE 10 installed on my other hard drive) but I just don’t know where everything is, and anything even slightly complicated involves editing system files and using the command prompt.

Still, everything is sorted now so I should be aright for another 6 months.