How Best Buy saved my life

Well, almost. But a very attentive and professional service assistant at a Best Buy store in Irvine, CA managed to fix my laptop today. How did that happen?

My new HP Compaq laptop first acted up last Thursday when a corrupt registry froze the computer every time I tried to boot. The friendly Burda helpdesk managed to fix the problem immediately and I assumed everything was going to be alright. Naively so. The problem reappeared during my flight from Germany to the U.S. on Saturday. There I was, carrying around a laptop that wouldn't show anything but a blue screen of death at boot time, about to attend E-Tech in San Diego, feeling like a wothless monkey.

So today I got into a rental car, desperatly looking for help. The folks at Kinko's weren't really resourceful and downloading an Ubuntu live image would haven taken three hours. So instead of paying 20 cent / minute for a 3-hour download, I checked out some more computer stores and finally stopped at Best Buy where they had a lot of fancy emergency boot disks that finally solved my problem. Now I am back at my hotel room, still very jet-lagged, but very happy my laptop is working again and on time for E-Tech tomorrow.