OT: Computer's...gotta hate 'em.

[Baron Munchausen]

Renegade 13 said:
Good news! It seems I just have a temperamental computer...

I killed it via the power switch, left it for a moment, fired it back up and voila! it functions perfectly again. I'm at a loss to explain why any of this happened, but now that it's fixed I really don't care too much.

It is odd though that a reset would not fix the problem (I tried resetting once), but a full power-down would...

Once again I'm in your debt Thermodyne and Alneyan for the help you provided me. I'm just surprised this time it had such a simple solution...

Remember that hardware manufacturers are pushing the limits in seach of performance. Given the speed at which things are developed, each new generation of hardware is really only 'nominally' reliable/stable until proven by months of use by the general public. Sometimes events unforseen by the manufacturers can cause various 'registers' in these very complex chip sets can get set to weird configurations that are not in the 'spec' and cause the system BIOS to get confused. Since the system is only able to cope with what the designers though of in advance, it can't fix itself. I've seen things like this myself. HDs and other peripherals can become unusable even though it doesn't make sense for the device to have been damaged by a mere software glitch. A hardware off instead of the 'reboot' switch fixes this, as you discovered.