NP: Chelsea vs. Manchester United

More tales from the robot uprising. My TiVo box and desktop PC are still only semi-functional, but thanks to Roy at Apple and Steve at Comcast, there are glimmers of hope. On that latter front, the glimmer only matters if the technician brings the correct CableCARD, and I had to get up at 8am this morning just to meet one that didn't. So we're still only at one and a half tuners, but this tech is going to try to come back later today with the right device.

With the PC, the helpful suggestion was that there was something about the computer talking to the external hard drive via the USB port that was somehow problematic. When attempting to reinstall those drivers made things worse, I restored to earlier settings and we're back to the previous semi-functional state. Except, somewhere in there, AVG started forcing a reboot instead of a hang, which means there's a "minidump" file that can be analyzed. Now I'm waiting on a hotfix from Microsoft to see if that addresses the issue.

If this doesn't work, I think it may be time to buckle up and reinstall Windows. It sounds to me like the more responsible geeks -- the ones that aren't proselytizing Linux or Mac, anyway -- do this every once in a while as a matter of course, so maybe it's not so bad.