UPDATE Saturday 9:30 a.m. PDT: Due to popular demand, I'm not taking this diary down. The geeks are having too much fun with it.
Steps taken so far: When I got home last night I opened the case on the tower and gently jiggled and blew out dust as was suggested by a few of you. There was a lot less cat hair in there than you'd predicted, although the floppy disk slot in the front of the tower did manage to cough up a sizeable furball. Didn't fix the problem.
exmearden, who is a mensch, came over at 11:00 last night and spent about two hours futzing with it, but no joy. The hard drive is, well, toast.
This morning I'm taking the tower to a computer repair shop that exme recommended, to see if I can recover the stuff on the hard drive and either repair the hard drive (which I doubt) or put in a new one. I'll probably also ask them to reinstall XP and all that while they're at it.
If anyone's interested, the propellerhead information at the bottom of the Blue Screen of Death error message was this:
*** STOP: 0x00000024 (0x00190203, 0x82F8B580, 0x0000102, 0x00000000)
So, this morning I'm on my home computer -- a 3 year old Dell. I have Daily Kos up on the screen, I'm playing a game of mahjong, I'm browsing my emails and I'm listening to music on I-Tunes. Fairly typical morning wake-up stuff (I do that instead of drinking coffee).
Boom.
Everything froze up to the point where I had to physically unplug the computer to shut it down. (It's prolly the third or fourth time that's happened since I bought the thing).
So I unplug, wait a minute and then replug it in, thinking it'll just boot right up like it always does.
Wrong.
It tried to boot up, but instead of my nice little Windows XP screen, I got a blue screen with an ominous sounding message telling me that (I'm paraphrasing here) my computer had gone boom and that I should reboot. It also said that if I ended up with the same message a second time I should disable my antivirus and disk utilities and then run some kind of funky sounding utility that looked like it would have to be run from a command prompt or something.
So I rebooted again, and again I had to do it by unplugging the computer. And I got that same Blue Screen of Semi-Death.
I called a good friend of mine who's a Computer Genius and described the problem. His response: "Yikes!" But he's on his way out of town and will be unavailable for several days to help me out.
Can one of you geniuses bail me out here? If you know the answer to this puzzle, please post below, or, if it is more involved than that, you can email the address in my profile and we can take it from there.
Eternal gratitude in advance...