Earlier in the week my aging Windows XP install had a wobbly moment and failed to boot fully after it’s ‘moment’. After disk checking, scanning and booting from the Windows CD, the install was hosed.
Time for the dreaded reinstall of Windows. I saved my profile from the old install and other data before deleting the old partition for the reinstall. A fresh start is always best at times like that.
With a super quick, fresh Windows install up and running it was time to put Firefox and Thunderbird back. I copied two directories for each program from my old profile to the new profile, as follows…
In theses two paths c:\documents and settings\myProfile\local settings\application data\ and c:\documents and settings\myProfile\application data\ both of the Mozilla and Thunderbird directories. These are hidden directories, but you have Show hidden files turned on, right?
With these directories laying in wait in my new profile, I installed Firefox and Thunderbird. No messages, or warnings… no news is good news? When I ran the applications everything was just as I left them, addons all worked (OK, View in Chrome didn’t, but an addon can’t work without it’s target program installed. 
), all my email accounts and email history were there. Superb and painless. Sorted!
Also in the order with the new graphics card was our long awaited replacement for our MP3 server, an Eee Box from Asus. They’re great little machines with an Intel Atom processor so their power consumption is very low and they’re almost silent. Oh and it has blue LEDs! The old out going Pentium 3 server machine, running Fedora, was getting noisy, not good for Steven’s room and his music recording.
The Eee Box set up
I upgraded the XP Home to Pro and copied the 80gb of MP3s to it, so we’re almost ready to swap it out and remap our network drives to it’s MP3 share.
The first attempt to copy the MP3s failed, out of space. Out of the box, the Eee Box is setup with three partitions, C: OS, D: Data and E: Restore. I quick Partition Magic session dumped the D partition and extended C to 150gb or so. That’s better.
It's tiny, did I mention it has blue LEDs!
I installed a shiny new nVidia 9600 GT today. Luckily I had a new PSU in the order. We try to keep a spare power supply at home, they seem to be the most likely part of a PC to fail. I had to fit the new PSU though, because the new card needed an extra power connection and my existing PSU didn’t have that type of connector on it. So really I need to get another PSU for our stock now.
So my PC is up and running again, working off my old laptop wasn’t too good. Although on the plus side I did install the latest version of Eclipse, that I didn’t know existed. Now I wonder how easy it’ll be to upgrade from 3.1 to Ganymede on my PC.
As the pictures show, my graphics card decided it was time to die. I was using it tonight, when suddenly the music stuttered and that nice random pattern appeared across the screen.
That's not quite right
I powered off the PC quick, but it was too late, the card is damaged. Grrrr. Scratch one nVidia 8600 GT. 
Interesting random pattern!