from the Church of the Mac Evangelist Dept.

At the same time as I was blogging about my love of Apple Macintoshes, my trusty old Dell PC was dying.

It runs Windows 2000 Professional, which is a very stable Operating System (considering it's from Microsoft). I have Win2K, because that's the platform I needed, when I used to develop software at home, prior to work giving me a laptop.

I refuse to upgrade to XP, as it seems there's little difference between it and 2000. I've previously referred to XP as Microsoft Windows Fisher-Price Edition, as the main change seems to be an unnecessary amount of animation and bright colours*.

Anyway, my Win2K install had recently become a little unstable, as if some DLLs had become corrupted. Additionally, the hardware of the PC was starting to be a tad erratic, sometimes not finding both the hard drives, or seizing up during boot-up.

At the end of last week, it finally keeled over and didn't get back up. It couldn't read it's floppy drive, and it couldn't find its hard disks. It was dead, Jim.

Spock! Analysis Please.
By launching from my Win2K CD, I could see that the main HD was corrupted somewhere around the boot sector. For you non-techies, that's the part of the hard disk that's accessed first when starting up, and tells the system which operating system it's going to be running, and starts that whole process.

To use one of my home-grown technical terms for a sec, I was in a Negative-Paddle-Scenario**

In A Galaxy Far Far Away - Centennial
So last night I drove over to my friend Endre's, and used his main PC (he has about 25 of them in a room that fits about 20 of them, provided you don't' want to breath out), to backup my key data.

Sure enough, the main partition (what was my C drive) was completely tits-up (that's a British technical term, for non-functioning technology), and in the end, had to be wiped harder than a zookeeper treating an elephant with diarrhoea.

So, now my PC has been freshly installed with Windows 2000, and we now begin the long, arduous task of reinstalling all the software I had on it previously.

The Next Generation
What the unsuspecting little tyke doesn't realise, is that there's a new faster processor and motherboard winging its way to me as we speak. In a day or two, surgery will commence.

*Yes, I know Mac OS X has animation and bright colours, but they're a lot more subtle than XP, and besides which, Apple got there first, so Nah!
**ie. Up Shit Creek without one