F9 THIS

So, I don't know if you know this, but I usually blog here using my teeny tiny laptop that I bought almost two years ago before Dell came out with their teeny tiny laptop. I tell you this because, had Dell offered a teeny tiny laptop with an operating system I was familiar with two years ago, I would have bought it. Instead, I bought THIS teeny tiny laptop because it was there, available for purchase at the time. Also, I can carry it in my purse. I'm easy, what can I say? Aside from the fact that you have to have leprechaun sized hands to type on this thing, it's been a cool, workable little computer. Until this morning when it started giving weird little messages to me. They looked a lot like "Could not read network connection list /home/user/.DCOPserver_eeepc
Please check that the dcopserver is running!" which I immediately translate as: YOU ARE SCREWED BECAUSE YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT LINUX, WHY DID YOU BUY A LINUX OPERATED MACHINE, YOU IDIOT. But, being the resourceful person I sometimes am, I googled this phrase (the first one, not the second one) and found the teeny tiny laptop users forum. Apparently, this whole dcopserver whatever BS happens a lot and there are people who have come up with 27 different ways to fix it. The thing that struck me though was that in every post, they talked about "avoid F9 at all costs", F9 as a "last resort" or IF YOU HIT F9 THIS MACHINE WILL MELT INTO OOZING ACID AND YOU WILL LOSE ALL YOUR FINGERS and I'm thinking, whoa, maybe I shouldn't hit F9, right? Until I get that error message another twenty-three times and I'm all, Efff this. I'll give it a shot. (obviously, there is a reason I did not go into tech support as a career, you don't need to tell me this). But you know what? All it did was reinstall the Linux OS and voila, my teeny tiny laptop workie again. What's up with the F9 Freakout, Geeks? Ok, so I lost any settings I might have had and anything I had saved on the hard drive is gone, and now my computer thinks my user name is OOJAY but pfshhhhh, dude, it worked. I'm happy. Feel free to call me the next time your computer gets all muckety muck. I have a really light touch.