Lev Lazinskiy

Reinstalling Windows at 1am

I took the HSK Level 1 Chinese Proficiency Test in the middle of November and passed it with flying colors. I was well prepared for it, but it almost felt too easy. I thought it would be fun to knock out the HSK Level 2 test before the end of 2024 as well. Unfortunately there were no more test dates left for this year. On a whim, I checked into the website one time in early December and saw that all of a sudden one final test date appeared for December 21st. Even thought I was not as prepared for this one I decided to give it a shot. The only problem is that this test would be taken remotely with a remote proctor and I would have to use Windows.

I’ve blissfully ignored Windows for nearly a decade. I’ve used it in Virtual Machines for Dagger related things, but have not had it installed on a physical computer in years. I didn’t know or care when Windows 11 came out and I had a feeling that my life was better for it. That feeling was confirmed on December 20th at around 11PM in a small hotel room in New Orleans.

The requirements to take the test remotely are to have a Windows machine, a second computer running zoom to watch you on the first computer, and a quiet and empty room with no one else in it. Aosheng and I decided to travel to New Orleans for the holidays, and I could not find an affordable office on a Saturday morning, so I booked a single night at a separate hotel at the Spring Hill Suites in the Warehouse district. I didn’t have a windows laptop, but I do have a Framework 16 laptop that Aosheng got me for my birthday that I’ve been running Debian on. I installed Windows on it a few weeks before the test and used it for a few weeks without incident.

The test started at 9am, but I had to check in a 7:30 to do a final room and tech check with the proctors. After getting into a po’ boy food coma the night before, I decided to just spend the night at the other hotel so that I wouldn’t have to worry about getting there in the morning. I arrived at the hotel and had this brilliant idea to double check that everything on my Windows laptop was working as expected. Boy am I glad I did.

I turned on the Framework 16 and was met with the infamous blue screen of death. Something about not being able to boot. I tried a couple of the recovery options, but nothing seemed to work and I had no idea what was going on. I decided to attempt to reinstall from the recovery partition and that ended up working, but it took a long time and all of my stuff got wiped out. I had to reinstall the special testing software and the random dependencies. Luckily everything worked and by 1 a.m. I was asleep in bed dreaming of 会， 给， 运动，睡觉， and the other 300ish characters on my list.

I woke up at 7:30, did the tech, sound, and room check, got everything working, ate a quick breakfast, and then started the test at 9. Right out of the gate it was a lot more intense than the HSK 1 level. It felt like they were asking intentionally convoluted questions and I had trouble understanding a lot of the listening section. When we got to the reading section, I understood every single word but a lot of the prompts just didn’t make any sense. I think I was unprepared, and the lack of sleep didn’t help. I finished the last question with no time to spare. I walked away from the test feeling a lot less confident than I did in the first one. I didn’t think I failed, but I assumed I just passed with the bare minimum score.

Last night, I logged into the testing site to check my score and was really happy to see that not only did I pass HSK 2, I only got two questions wrong!

I am feeling more motivated than ever to keep going. HSK3 adds an additional 300 characters (bringing the total to 600). It also includes a speaking section for the first time, and no longer has any pinyin in the reading section so you truly must know the characters. I am going to give myself a few more months to study for this one, and I don’t think I’ll take the remote test if I can avoid it. Hopefully after this I’ll never have to use Windows again.