Right. So I got up today early to get Zoë ready for school (normally, Andrew does that, but he had to go to Canberra on business today and left super early). I generally leave my computer on at night, so that I can leave stuff open and so on. I do disconnect from the net, of course.

Anyway, I came out to get Zoë up and had a bit of time to spare (amazingly!) and sat at the computer while she ate her breakfast. Guess what? The computer, she is broke.

Not sure what happened, but some part of the C drive got corrupted or overwritten or something, and Windows was pretty much toast.

I mucked around with it for some time and finally ended up blowing away the C drive (thankfully, nothing much on there except some ripped MP3s that I put on there to listen to so I wouldn't have to dig out the CDs every time, and yes, I have every reason to believe that's completely legal, thank you). I now have a strangely confgured dual boot system with Win98 and WinXP (long story, prolly best if you don't ask), each on a different drive (in case you're wondering, I have three physical hard drives with a total of five partitions amongst them). Windows XP now runs on the D partition, which is kinda weird.

I also decided that even though this was (relatively) minor, I really need to do that upgrade I've been planning. This weekend, I'm going to grab Andrew and we're going out geek shopping. I'm getting a new motherboard and processor, a new case (I HATE the case I have, it's enormous, and no, I didn't choose it), memory, and proper USB2.0 ports, and plenty of them. Don't need a video card, and so long as the motherboard has a built-in sound card, I'm good with that. And I'll be keeping my floppy drive, thank you very much. It's saved my butt a few times having that there, and I'm not inclined to part with it. It's not like it's doing any harm sitting there, so I may as well just keep it, right?

Anyway, I've got WinXP all updated to SP2 now and got the firewall semi-configured and I'm running a virus scan. How on earth it happens that a completely fresh install has infected files in the TEMP directory I can't imagine, but there appear to be several. Weird.

I also had to change my screen resolution. I used to keep it at 1200x1600 but today I couldn't get the display to go that high with 32bit color, and so I've got it at 1280x1024 and, amazingly, I find that I can actually read what's on the screen, so I might just leave it this way. Less screen real estate, but I can read what's on it, so that's probably a good trade off, and it might help my eyestrain headaches.

So, well, other than the incredibly tedious job of reinstalling everything (which I think I'll put off until I get the upgrade, anyway), I think thinks are mostly okay with the computer for the moment. It was an annoying day, though, I must say...