Hardware vexation
My laptop (an HP 2530p) gets quite a lot of abuse. It's been with me enough to have done the equivalent of going round the world 4 or 5 times, and it's typically just thrown in a bag without any particular care or attention being given to its care or wellbeing. It's been dropped a couple of times with the only damage being some corners that aren't really as even as they should be. All in all, it's survived amazingly well. But it recently started refusing to boot, merely flashing its LEDs. After finally finding a list of what these mean, I narrowed it down to the memory. Taking it apart and putting it back together again got things working for a while, but then it happened again. And again. So, since I have one memory module and two slots, I decided to just move the RAM in the hope that there's something physically wrong with the slot. It worked! Until I got to the BIOS splash and it informed me that Intel AMT requires that there be memory in slot 0. And didn't give me an opportunity to continue without AMT.
My hardware is conspiring against me.