Starting over. Again.

I reinstalled Windows this weekend. It has been an ordeal. I'm not happy about it. Here's why:*

I never actually got around to blogging about this, but a couple months ago I bought a new case, gutted my PC, and performed transplant surgery. The procedure was only moderately successful. Due to the sheer size of the new box, I've needed a new power supply unit and a new EIDE cable ever since. It works, but until I buy the afforementioned replacement parts, I can only run one hard drive and one optical drive, and my current PSU is hanging off the motherboard instead of being solidly attached to the bottom of the box as it should be.

Meanwhile, my OS has been getting more and more unstable. I haven't reinstalled in two years, and even before that, I had severe boot issues that were never resolved. Last Thursday my video card started overheating, which, on top of everything else, was just... just super. I discovered that its fan was no longer turning properly. I can't tell if the bearings are wearing or if it's just out of lubricant, but it doesn't matter because I disassembled the entire thing and I can't fix it.

This is the point where I said, "Fuck it." Using Jenny's computer, I pulled everything I wanted to save off of my primary, 250GB hard drive and my secondary, 100GB drive (that I haven't been able to use lately), burned it to disc, installed the 100 gigger back into my PC as the main drive, and put a clean install of XP Pro on it (that I luckily happened to have lying around).

Without a proper video card, I'm back to running on my mobo's Xpress 200 chipset, but at least everything is working. I can even boot normally, which means I was right in my long-held theory that there's a bad sector somewhere on my 250 gigger that caused the boot problems that survived the system restore two years ago.

So now, after two days of updating drivers, rebooting, updating Windows, rebooting, reinstalling critical software, rebooting, updating Windows again, rebooting, and updating Windows again, all I have to do is buy and install a new 20"+ EIDE cable, a new video card, and a new ATX PSU with at least 7 auxilliary connectors. And hope that my 250GB HD isn't a piece of shit.

So, yeah. Fun three-day weekend.

*you don't care why, but I'm posting it anyway