Michelle just called. She was in a bit of a panic because the home computer locked up in the middle of the kids playing one of their games. I welcomed her to the hell we used to go through nearly daily here at the office until we upgraded all PCs to Windows 2000. It's amazing that it took Bill Gates and his team so long to come up with an operating system that didn't hang. If it weren't for the expense, I would consider putting Win2K on the home machine. I'd rather not give Microsoft even more money to give me an OS that doesn't hang. It should have been more stable in the first place! It's their third generation of "Windows" product after all. Enough ranting. This story has been repeated by millions of users over the years....
Anyway, I walked her through the progressive steps of trying to bring the machine down gracefully. No luck, of course, so the machine had to forcefully powered down. I explained that she'll have to wait a bit when it reboots while it verifies its integrity after a forced power down. Well, now she knows why I enjoyed using the Sun Solaris machines for all those years.