Bits and PCs, and numbers, and panic

During the weekend at home, I had to make what for me passes as a mature and reasoned decision: the 386 is going to have to go. It's been languishing under my desk for as long as anyone can remember, but when I started it up to try and retrieve QBasic from it, it couldn't find its 100MB hard drive, and even when I gently pointed it out it failed to find any sort of operating system on it. So I can only conclude that the hard drive has finally failed catastrophically, and no parts of it are of any use to any other computer in the house, so it's been earmarked for dumping. It's euthansia, really.

I made up for it by peeling apart the 486 instead and putting the larger of its two hard drives into the P3. I quickly found out that it had the worst designed case in the world, necessitating not only removing the floppy drive before getting to the hard disks, but also the power cable and the entire drive bay as well. I actually did all this so that I could see the old TGF/MMF files on them again, but unfortunately they all turned out to be much more appalling than I remember.

When Whitney and I got down the road, it was obvious that my own computer had somehow heard about me skinning and eviscerating its friends, as it stuck firmly at the Windows XP Home bootup screen, and when told to use the last known good configuration it simply reset itself repeatedly. I went to the library to find some online advice, and after a panicked evening of going into Safe Mode and trying some System Restores, I'm not even sure why it's working now. Apparently it's something to do with my new graphics card's software being dodgy, but the card still works fine in itself. Computers are too much trouble sometimes.

If I could find my blasted pendrive, everything would be great.