I hobbled in to work today, because I injured my knee over the weekend.

I work with this guy, let’s call him Newsom, who really doesn’t have a lot of patience for my sense of humor. This is kind of fun for me. So when I limped into my morning meeting, Newsom asked, “What’d you do?”

“I injured my knee this weekend,” I said.

“How?”

“I blew out my knee upgrading my computer to Windows 7.”

Of course this made Newsom mad because he thought I was trying to be funny. But actually, I wasn’t lying. Of course, I was trying to be funny; I’m always trying to be funny. But I really did hurt my knee upgrading my home computer to Windows 7.

You surely remember me blogging before about building my home PC, so of course you remember how I built it with two 750 GB 7200 RPM drives. I used one of these drives for the OS and programs and the other for data. Well, about a month ago I got a corrupt registry file that I fixed, caused by a bad sector on the disk.

As you know, getting a bad disk sector is like having someone move into your neighborhood who puts up Halloween lights. It starts out as just the one, but before long everyone is doing it, and now the whole neighborhood is ruined.

So, knowing that I was going to be upgrading to Windows 7 soon, I bought a new 320 GB 7200 RPM drive to replace my bad disk but set it aside until the upgrade day came.

Which was last Saturday. So I pulled the PC out from under the desk, sat down on the ground, and proceeded to pull the old hard drive out and put the new one in, and then I started the install.

It started up fine, but after a bit it said that it couldn’t use my ASUS DVD drive because it didn’t have the correct driver for it. Upgrading the firmware didn’t help, and ASUS didn’t offer any newer drivers.

Honestly, that thing never worked right anyway. So we headed down to Best Buy to get a new one.

I walked quickly through Best Buy and found me a nice HP DVD writer drive. As a bonus, it’s a SATA drive, not IDE, which is excellent since I had two open SATA slots. And it said it worked with Vista, which gave me confidence it would also work well for Windows 7. So I picked that one up.

I noticed walking around Best Buy that I was feeling a bit of a popping sensation in my knee every time I flexed it.

When I got home, I sat down on the floor again and opened the PC to install the new drive. I started the install again and everything went fine. But when I went to stand up, I felt a very intense, sharp, burning pain in my knee, and it has been like that ever since.

I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I now realize quite clearly: This is ASUS’s fault. Some might claim this is Microsoft’s fault. I’ve thought about this, though, and I know quite clearly that it is not Microsoft’s fault. This is primarily because I work there. And of course, it isn’t my fault. I mean, seriously!

Yeah, ASUS is to blame.

(By the way, the Windows 7 install went without a hitch after that. And, coming from a fan of Linux and Mac desktops, I have to say that Windows 7 is really excellent.)

UPDATE: Diagnosis is complex tear in right medial meniscus plus partially torn medial collateral ligament. Surgery to come.