Pouring

**pulls out a fresh tissue**

It's a beautiful sunny day outside and I am sitting inside fixing the kids bloody computer. It fell over with a virus a month or so back, a nasty one and I just couldn't be bothered cleaning up the mess left behind when one of them visited something dodgy on the net and Avast let me down and didn't stop the infiltration of cyber-germ warfare. They have been forced to use the old, slooowww dual boot linux/XP box in the meantime and I finally got sick of the whining and started fixing it.

And fixing it.

And, well, you get the picture.

Their trouble free, goes and goes and goes old Compaq box just didn't want to go. I got the damn thing working fine except for a small problem of damaged components that wouldn't open ports to the outside world - ie no internet. It wouldn't let me repair them. Replacing them didn't work. I couldn't restore their disk image because Ghost couldn't read the hard disk.

It wouldn't even let me reinstall XP. Bastard thing.

So I took the hint that their main drive isn't a happy camper, stripped it back to the chassis and rearranged all their hardware, cleaned every nook and cranny of it, replaced all the proprietory Compaq screws that only a butter knife will undo with proper screws, replaced the CD writer with a DVD writer, put another spare hard drive in as a master drive and now, finally, it is installing XP like a good little computer on one partition of the drive.

Then all I have to do is move the data on partition #2 to another drive, format it, repartition the disk to be full size minus a small pagefile partition and reinstall all their multitude of games and apps and God knows what else.

A couple of days pissing about will have cured the whining, whilst the fighting over whose turn it is on the PC will crank up again.

A girl just can't win.

I think I'll go hide in my room and write a shopping list - it's time to replace my nearly 6 year old generic PC with a new, built by me jobbie and consign this one to being a movie and music network media server tucked away under my desk and thus free up a shit load of hard drive space on all the machines.

All I gotta do is figure out how to pay for the components... and not fuck it up during construction!