Well, I finally took the time to get my main PC operational this weekend. Unfortunately, I did have a delay in that the Windows XP Professional CD I made was slightly defective. I ended up needing to create a new CD, and only then did the install work properly. I spent most of Saturday reinstalling the operating system, drivers, and applications. That of course excludes games; I figure I’ll install the games on an as-needed basis. About the only program I didn’t install was WindowBlinds, and that was because I mainly used that for putting a black theme on my desktop. Finding the Royal Noir theme made it unnecessary. :-) Of course, now I have Sinc asking me if I want to play Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath. I don’t even HAVE the game yet… heh. Still, all in all, I’m getting more or less back to normal. I’ve even managed to pull my movies off of the iPod.
The funny thing is that I’m not entirely sure the “dead” 320 GB SATA hard drive that I pulled out of the PC is actually dead. I think the two drives may have become desynched, though I don’t know for certain. What I’ll probably end up doing is buying an external enclosure for the drive and use it as an external drive with the main PC. If it doesn’t work, well, I can go buy a new drive easily enough. :-)
On the other hand, I apparently did something foolish with the PowerBook. While the main PC was offline I was using it as my main computer, and had it on almost a week 24/7. I put it in sleep mode while I was at work the last couple of days, but apparently the damage was done. On Friday, I noticed that the video was corrupted. I turned the PowerBook off and let it rest overnight, but it didn’t help. The video chipset is apparently FUBARed, with lots of corruption and artifacting going on. *sigh* It’s a shame, because that laptop has served me extremely well for over five years. Unfortunately, I can’t justify the cost of a new MacBook, as I still use my work laptop for anything work related and take that with me on most trips (as it has the VPN software to connect to the office and has a built-in cellular broadband card). That’s especially annoying as I used the PowerBook for video editing. Then again, I only did video editing when out at events for Mortal Kombat Online. *sigh* I’m sure I’ll think of something, though.
Ah, well. At least my main PC is pretty much operational. I’ll deal with any other problems as they come.