Sheer Heart Attack

I learnt a lesson tonight.

My PC came with Windows XP Home, and has been functioning well for a year and a half, happily doing all I ask of it. No breakdowns, no faults, running smoothly so what on earth made me decide it would be a good idea to ‘upgrade’ to XP Professional? That would be my Stupid Voice.

Put the CD in, run the upgrade check and no problems found, for a system only a year and half old that’s not surprising, so off I go. All is well until ’34 minutes to go’. The install stops. It waits three minutes and restarts the PC. Which restarts the installation and all goes well until ’34 minutes to go’. The install stops. It waits three minutes and restarts the PC.

It does this fifteen times. No operating system fully installed means no PC.

The cold sweats started about restart #5.

You know it’s never good when you start dismantling your PC to remove the hard drive. The aim was to see if I could plug it into Rae’s PC to salvage as much as I could. Unfortunately the other PC refused to acknowledge it had a new drive. I’m much more a software guy than a hardware guy so I decided to plug the drive back in to my PC where, by the some Divine intervention (and most probably thanks to me removing everything except the monitor, mouse and keyboard) it magically decided to finish the install on restart 16.

It’s been six hours since I started the install that should have taken 40 minutes to complete. I’ve pulled apart two PC’s, my PC is still in pieces (yet functioning), it tries to boot from the A: drive and I can’t find the BIOS settings to stop it doing so, I need to reinstall internet sharing for Rae’s PC and I’m very very tired.

But my PC works.

And I’ve learnt my lesson. Next time I’ll just buy a new computer with XP Pro pre-installed.