I have a basement full of computers. Not nearly as full as it once was, but full none the less. For the first time in a year, I am off for a whole week. Since my wife watches kids during the week, construction projects are out. You can guess where this is going.

Almost two years ago my wife’s computer went down with a bad hard drive. I set her up with one of the “spares” and she has been using that ever since. Her box was the first to go under the knife. I installed two Hitachi 160G SATA drives. It took me a couple of attempts to get everything right, but when I did it worked out great. I did a full install of XP Pro in 8 minutes on an AMD 2400 (2.0 Ghz) with 512M RAM. I bumped up the RAM to 2G and everything is hunky dory.

Next up is the ridiculously expensive laptop I bought that fried itself in under two years. Wish me luck on that one.