Those letters were spelled out at the top of my screen. Blood was rushing to my head. I seriously did not plan to spend the weekend fixing a broken computer.My oldest son had asked to borrow my laptop so he could play some web games. He had brought his own mouse; a small one with lights flashing in different colours. I got it as a present from work, but I gave it him as I already have a good mouse. Also I thought it a bit silly.

I tried to restart several times but ended up getting the same error message. So I decided to look in the BIOS to see if there was something useful in there. There was; the boot sequence allowed for USB devices to boot first. Which is not strange because I sometimes boot various Linux distributions from a USB stick.

Then it came to me: One of the reasons I though the mouse silly is because it has 16Mb of DataFlash built in (yes, really). The computer tried to boot from the mouse!

I think there is a lesson in this story…