what a night!

One of the incredibly-cool things about working at Enron was the 'Click-at-Home' program, where every employee was given a Dell computer and monitor FOR FREE. It was a 866 mhz machine, and I used it as my main home machine for years.

Then I upgraded to something more powerful and it became my back-up machine. Then it developed some weird behaviors, and it sat dormant for a while. Then Karen's assistant's computer started acting flaky, so I put a new CD drive and a new hard-drive into the Dell.

The hard-drive was only 8 GB, which was fine for Karen's assistant's needs - it cost just a few dollars, at FreeGeek. It had been used as a dual-boot Linux/Windows drive, so the partitioning was weird. I spent a little time trying to reconfigure the partitions, and settled for one 2 GB and 1 6 GB partitions, and installed Windows XP on the 2 GB.

You can see it coming, right? XP started complaining that 2 GB was just not sufficient and that disk space was consistently running low. So, in the closing hours until Karen's return tomorrow afternoon, I thought I'd go up to her office at 5 pm this afternoon, use an old copy of Partition Magic to resize the partitions, and go merrily on my way.

Nice try. Partition Magic ended up having to erase everything in both partitions (there was no actual business data on this computer - it only needs to see Karen's computer and have a local install of Office). That was inconvenient, but I figured that all I had to do was boot my XP install disk and away we go.

No luck - it couldn't boot from the XP CD. I broke out in a cold sweat, as I realized that I had totally wiped out this computer. Right then, my cell phone rang, and it was my sweetie, checking in about getting picked up at the airport tomorrow around 5 pm. I gulped and informed her that I had just totally hosed her assistant's computer.

I stayed with it for another hour, trying every combination of BIOS boot configurations, but the thing appeared to be brain-dead. I unplugged the box and brought it home, and ate some dinner while I tried to figure everything out.

I had two copies of Windows 2000, and tried them. One made it about 50% thru and froze. Back to Partition Magic to wipe out the 2nd partition and just make one big one. This time it worked, and, an hour later, Windows 2000 and Office were installed.

Pushing my luck, I tried the XP install CD and, voila, this time it worked fine. It is now 11:45 pm, and XP is just now coming up, looking blessedly normal.

I've been sweating and swearing for almost 7 hours, but the end is in sight. Tomorrow morning, I'll take the box back up to her office, and hopefully complete the networking stuff and get it connected to her DSL line.

With any luck, when Debra gets in Monday morning, she'll never know that, for about 2 hours Friday night, her computer had total amnesia.

What a world. Good night (after the Letterman Top 10, that is).