Worked for Food (Steak)

I actually worked for food. This wasn't intended. It was actually a rescue mission. A friend's W2000 box had managed to catch a trojan and Norton's fix had wiped out most of the exe files as far as I could tell. The trojan was dead too, but the village was burned almost to the ground. Last Known Good Boot wasn't. He wanted to put on Norton 2007 but it liked only .... XP or newer. Go figure.

I despise XP. It's W2000 with the nanny state attitude.

But XP is what he wanted. The first day sucked. He had gotten the Home. So of course, XP Home needs to upgrade from a W98 box. Needed to put the box back to W98. He did originally have W98, so that was ok. Only problem is, after trying it, is that W98 never could boot from the CD. Ransacked his computer area for a 98 boot disk but he didn't have one. So, no way of removing the W2000 and backing it to W98 which is what he had in the first place. I could put it back to W2000 but Norton doesn't like that OS anymore.

AARRRGH!

So I beat a temporary retreat and moved the modem and a CD drive into the original XP box which promply refused to boot. XP doesn't like it if you move too much hardware around. Really, one lousy CD drive and a generic modem? Even after I ripped the stuff back out, it was the Bluescreen of Near-Death. Aah Tell Ya, If I saw Bill the G and I had a blunt object in my hands, he would have bruises.

After trying to get that back, gave up and went off to bed. Felt really bad about it, since his Quicken is what he uses and I had just managed in six hours of hard work to make every financial file unreachable.

The Next Day

So, back into the fray, after picking up a copy of Sid Meier's Pirates (addictive game, played it for a week straight later)on the way.

I threw the original XP CD into the original XP box and turned it on and left it. Then I saw on the back shelf a pile of dusty floppies. Two of which were boot disks for W98. One was just dead as a door nail, another one had just enough usable files to do an Fdisk and take out all the partitions. It was too dead to get the CD drive going. The first time, XP choked, so I did a low level NTFS format, the long let's flatten everything to the ground type, and then it was hunky dory all the way, got it to see that, yes, he did have legit W98 in the past, and after awhile, got the box up and running and back on the internet with that Norton 2007 POS installed.

Meanwhile, quietly in the background, somehow the original XP box, by itself, fixed itself. That I left alone. His Quicken was back and updated, so I refused to touch that box. It was working, so no "fixin".

I'm A+ and Net+ certified. I know how to fix computers but that was hard. I guess I better make real sure I have a fresh copy of the W98 boot disk. Still, my friend was happy and he gave me four beautiful steaks, huge ones that came off a grass fed corn fattened steer. Kroger would have charged 8 bucks a pound for these and what they have, is small dinky ones from not so great cows off of feedlots.

Yeah, I worked for food. Geek Squad, eat your heart out, for I had three of them over the last week and they were delicious.