Yesterday, the parts for my Windows computer upgrade arrived. "Just a simple thing," I thought. "Pop out the old components, pop in the new ones, badda bing, badda bang, badda boom."

Badda boom, all right.

When I upgraded Theseus the last time, with all sorts of blinkenlights and gauges, I'd had the bright idea to cable-tie everything nice and neat to improve the airflow. Which worked wonders, but it took me the better part of two days to clip off all the cable ties, take out all the parts (and label the ones that had to go back in), clean out the dust, fur, and dead moth (take THAT, Admiral Grace Hopper!), put in the new hardware, rewire all the blinkenlights, and cable-tie everything back down.

And then it wouldn't boot.

It hung at "Verifying DMI Pool Data", which generally means a master boot record issue. No problem, I pulled out the XP disk, entered repair mode, and ran FIXMBR. No boot. I went to repair mode again, ran FIXBOOT... no dice.

Alas, it looks like the only thing I can do is reinstall. Which means reinstalling all the applications as well. Fortunately, I have one drive for Windows and programs, and keep all my data on two other drives, so formatting my Windows drive won't wipe out any data. Also, every time I download a new program (or an update to commercial software), I keep a copy of the installer in a directory on one of my data drives — so reinstalling shouldn't be that much of a hassle. The only thing I'm worried about is the programs that register themselves with their companies, and only permit one copy to be registered; I hope they have an easy mechanism for revoking the activations...

I was really tempted to convert it to Linux, but I do need one Windows machine around. Well, at least I can try out 64-bit XP Professional now.