Hello old Win98SE machine. Amazing what actually still works in Firefox 2.0... DoA, even my Yahoo web file manager. Tumblr? Not so much. A lot of sites hang on endless script issues and I'm not even gonna try something like Youtube. DA works but looks partly broken... and yes, has this obnoxious "upgrade ur sh*t plz" error across the top of the page.... like I can upgrade to anything better on an outdated and unsupported OS.

So why, gentle reader, am I punishing myself with this nostalgia trip when I could be zipping around the internet with *cough* Windows XP... what. Money doesn't grow on trees. (And dolls eat it anyways... nevermind that my new PC building project has shot to highest priority now but I still have layaways puttering towards final payments.) So before I get ahead of myself, some of this may sound like Greek but bear with me if you're bored, cuz I am... or tl;dr and sum it up with "my good PC is currently getting everything reinstalled from scratch."

Yeah. Bleh. I'd been having problems with bootup for a while now and finally yesterday got an error that gave me a clue as to what was going on (and also how bad it was getting). The best case scenario was that the motherboard battery was dying. If so, no problem, been there replaced that, it's like $6 and there's a Radio Shack within walking distance. Worst case scenario, the power supply and/or motherboard was dying. Le eww. The power supply is a piece of junk anyways but... as Han Solo said, "Hear me baby? Hold together." For a few more months while I collect the rest of my ubermachine parts, preferably.

Sooo, last night I got this relic running just in case (Pentium 2 400mhz with 380ish megs of RAM). I knew it'd boot and was internet ready, just hadn't found out which version of Firefox would run on it yet. Today, I got the new battery for the main PC, which reset CMOS as it will do when you take the old one out. That restored CMOS to default settings which was fine. I get to my desktop and.... Windows tells me that key system files have been replaced with unknown file types (or something, I forget the exact error now), and that I need to insert the Windows XP SP 3 disk... which of course I don't have because I downloaded SP3 from Microsoft Update like everyone else. My original Windows XP Home edition disk wouldn't work either. So I choose not to install the files (cuz I can't) and the error tells me "well that's nice, your system will be unstable now."

Lovely. I reboot just in case it helps, then AVG antivirus starts updating and gets stuck in some kind of endless loop. CPU usage is listed at 100% and everything lags terribly. Unstable, you say? I see. After a couple more reboots I disabled AVG before it could try updating again (it tried every reboot), backed up my important files, and hello reformat/reinstall. And since everything was all on one partition, goodbye games that took ages to download/patch.

Being as I've never done two partitions on one drive before, I decided to do that this time with help from online tutorials (yay for having a backup computer). This turned out to be a whole new frustration as FDISK didn't like how big the hard drive was. I finally got the partitions the size I wanted by using the Windows XP install disk, and an earlier failed attempt to install XP told me that "the hard drive might be damaged." I remember this from last time... it's not, or it wasn't then, but just in case I'm running an in-depth DOS scandisk on the entire 250gb drive. Translation: takes. for. fuggin. ever.

So yes, it's 2am on a Friday night and this is what I'm doing. I just hope I have WinXP back sometime tomorrow... and updated enough to catch Cry's livestream.  

In other news, homemade fries are nummy!

Update 1, 5/19 4:52pm EST:
Well it's now the next "morning" aka post-sleep and not only has XP failed to install as bootable (yay instant bluescreen of death) but the install tells me my XP disk might be bad... and also asks for the SP2 disk which it shouldn't even knows exists!? (After checking later, that was included with my XP disk on the same disk and I had tried to get it to look at the disk anyways and it still didn't care.) Ugh. Reformatting and trying again after cleaning the one speck of dust off the disk that might have been there. *crosses fingers*

Oh, and the problems I've been having with the PC not properly booting up for several power-on/offs after it's been shut down for a while? The thing I thought changing the battery fixed since it powered on nice and proper after changing it yesteday? Yeah. That's back.

Update 2, 6pm EST:
WE CAN HAS DESKTOP! And 50 bajillion things to reinstall. For some reason I keep expecting it to like... explode or something. Par for the course. Meanwhile, workin' on that and... farting around the basic internets on the old PC still. Y'know, my Win95/98 disks also had random install problems... and I've always taken extremely good care with them. Spendy OS's are (or were) spendy. MS needs to learn how to burn disks or something.

Update 3, 5/20 5:30pm EST:
Well, it appears that anything I download from the internet may not install properly... this includes Java (partly failed, partly installed), updated video card drivers (failed every time, I'm stuck using the ones that came on CD with the card), and wireless trackball drivers (smaller software setup failed during a part where it has to download stuff during the install, full package install I got after that installed more before failing and required being uninstalled via Add-Remove Programs). I even had to download and install one Windows XP security update manually.

So... well, it's working, sort of. Isn't technology grand? A real test is gonna be something like Guild Wars... because so much of that patches from their servers now. Eep.