Saturday

A busy day ahead - today I am fixing my sister-in-laws computer. The motherboard has died and I bought a replacement on eBay - annoyingly it was advertised as 'new-other' - turns out it's more 'other' than 'new' as it has clearly been well and truly used. On the upside it came with a spare processor and memory, and considering the price of the total package (30EUR), it's a pretty excellent bargain. I reckon I may be able to sell the processor and a spare stick of memory) adds time to the process because I will need to show that they are working...
After the usual frustrating prodding and poking of the replacement motherboard, I managed to get the thing running - seems like the operating system won't load from the original hard-drive, so I am wiping the drive and will install XP pro (was originally Vista) - I expect more frustrations along the way, as these jobs are rarely straightforward, but with the experience of repairing plenty of laptops, I am relatively relaxed about it. If all else fails, I will just split the computer up into it's component parts and flog it on eBay....but hopefully it won't come to that - I still find it very satisfying to complete a fresh operating system install.

The hard-drive wipe (done with 'BCWIPE' free software) has two hours remaining of the 12 that it takes to do a 'standard' wipe of all free space (already formatted the drive). I am doing this by attaching the drive via USB to another computer.

I also have to take my daughter to an all-day choir event, and then squeeze in a game of football and a visit to the library....