The Horror, Oh How Horrible

My PC might be the quirkiest in the entire world.

Lately, I've been troubled by the random processes, admin services, and slow boot-ups on my PC. It eventually got to the point (after installing Adobe CS3) that IE7 failed to connect and I couldn't do anything about it. So I decided it was time to do a full reinstall.

Now, for some reason, my DVD-RW burns perfectly, but it can't read a boot disc to save its life. It might be because its on SATA or something, I'm not sure, but it doesn't work. My other DVD drive boots, but it only boots off of DVDs. Every single CD that I put in there failed to boot...strangely enough. I threw in two version of Windows XP, a copy of Ubuntu that I installed on my laptop, finally reverting to my old Windows XP DVD and a DVD Fedora 5. Only the DVDs worked. What now?

I ended up burning the CD images of my new Windows XP onto DVD's, which ended up working quite well, but for some reason, I felt like I should try to set up my RAID. It's been the bane of my PC since I built it. I could never quite get a slipstreamed XP install to work with NVRAID and I'd always spend hours trying before giving up and installing in two separate partitions. So, instead of being smart, I rush things and wipe my hard disks and set up a RAID0 array with them. Of course, by this point, my floppy drive was fubar and I couldn't make a RAID driver disk to set up my raid (like I was hoping to...) so I'm stuck again trying to get my floppy working to make an NVRAID disk before reinstalling Windows with RAID. Unfortunately, my floppy was just messed up. Nothing I could do about but give up again...

But, thanks to new technology and savvy computer programmers around the world, someone devised a program that lets you add slipstreamed drivers. I downloaded nLite on my laptop, extracted the windows image file, added the RAID drivers to the disk, set up the slipstream...and VOILA. I'm half way through my installation and it's working! By golly-gee! It's working!

I feel like Marlow when he finally reaches his destination to see Kurtz. It's finally come together like I've always wanted...yippee.

Btw, does anyone want to join a 8-12 man keeper fantasy football league this year? I think I want to run one in perpetua. And should I think about buying Settlers of Catan for myself, just so I don't have to rely on other people to have it around in order to play? Just a thought. Shoot me a line.