One trick for trouble shooting is to use an external bootable system over USB - such as using the software 'YUMI' and installing
a distribution like 'UBCD' (Ultimate Boot CD) or HiRen's Boot Disc - both very excellent free software bundles with overwhelming functionality.
These can be installed onto CD's or USB Drives (pref) or even installed by your phone's (android) USB drive with a free software named Drive Droid.
Currently I'm enjoying a trial of Hootsuite, and writing some perl code for a kinda interesting data mining interface I'm working on..
Also playing around with Maltego and Rapid Miner - 3 linux boxes are my dev machines, one on amazon, one a headless virtual machine on my laptop, one a netbook server running debian - been using it since package managers were 'the new thing'...
Hope to work on a Raspberry PI distributed sensor network ....
I do a little gaming, some GTA V PC online if anyone wants to brawl, but I several months clean of a wow relapse .. lol ...