Blegh... sleep cycle is all messed up. I shouldn't have watched the entire LoTR trilogy through the night the other day - extended editions and all -.-'

So... my computer bust the other week. It had been blue screening alot, it only started when I had a sudden strange urge to play The Sims 2 for no reason, and I couldn't understand why it was crashing on a system that can easily handle Oblivion and Crysis.

Stupidly I shrugged it off each time it happened and maybe 7 or 8 blue-screen-of-deaths later, the computer wouldn't turn back on.

Inspecting the computero's components revealed scorch marks on the power supply unit and my graphics card's power connector (Luckily the graphics card survived *somehow*).

2 hours later salvaged parts and an old computer give birth to a new computer, and it was almost complete! Then came problem after problem after problem.

• No SATA slots on the motherboard - my 2 SATA hard drives, now useless.
• Got to work installing XP on a crappy 60GB IDE hard drive.
• After that finished I remembered that I had a SATA PCI card stored somewhere, stupid brain!
• Got my main SATA hard drives plugged in *yay!*
• They're screwed *nooooo!* T,T
• 1 & 1/2 hours later after failing to repair/restore my SATA drives, the computer then ignored the fresh install of XP and kept trying to boot the corrupted OS' on the SATA drives.
---(by this point I was nearly bald)---
• After much tinkering - making the bios think there was a floppy drive installed when there wasn't somehow fixed the boot problem.
• Finally I got in the OS, and to my suprise I found both the SATA drives intact and accessible *yay my stored anime*
• Oh poo. No drivers.
• Double poo. This motherboard has long been discontinued and the manufacturers feel they have no obligation to keep the drivers available. I managed to scrape most drivers together from names and product numbers on the chips but the only one I couldn't find, was for the network port.
• Then I noticed it thinks it has a 1.5Ghz Processor and 2 other CPUs when it only has one P4 3Ghz
• Procured a Network Card from teh Harpers (cheers!), and *woo* I have intarweb!!

-.-'

I need a job! All that hard work could probably have been avoided had I upgraded or something, although I must admit, I enjoyed tinkering with it...

Still haven't fixed the processor thing but at least Corel Painter seems to work properly on this computer. Might start submitting some more of my stuff soon..

ZL~