Oh noooo!

Two nights ago I was shutting down my laptop Shadow (a Toshiba Satellite L-300) and suddenly the screen went wonky and then a page like this showed up asking me for a password. Except I don’t use a password for Shadow. And then I remembered that the same thing happened to my friend Flor a couple of years ago with her almost new Toshiba. Apparently there is a company-set password that exists in each Toshiba computer and sometimes something sets it off – have never been sure what. Anyhow, Flor had to have her laptop memory replaced and lost all her data, photos, etc. because she hadn’t made a back up. Disaster.

I have no idea what happened the other night but it could be the very stupid shut-down process on Windows Vista. As you can see, there are various options given, the first three being “change user”, “close session” and “block”. Block?? Who the hell would want to block their own computer? In any case, ever since hearing about Flor’s problem I have been very careful when signing out, but I must have hit block instead of close session and then got the scary screen above asking me for my password.

I tried one of my usual passwords (even though I knew I hadn’t set one – panic!) and then remembered that when Flor tried doing this, after about three tries her computer shut down totally. Aack. So then I tried rebooting by holding down the off button and turning it back on again and … phew! It worked! But later when I tried shutting down by closing my session I got the scary password screen again. So I did the same re-start thing and haven’t dared turn my laptop off since. It has a sleep button, so I’ve been using that.

Luckily I had just reorganised all my photos and had done a back-up of all my important files on my external HD. But now what do I do?