Wound up rebuilding (yet again) a Windows box that has decided to start corrupting its hard disk. Swapped in another hard disk from a box just as old (4GB). 7 hours later, it's wiped, installed, firewalled, anti-virused, IE has been replaced with Firefox, the DVD player is working, the menus have been cleaned up, the old profiles have been moved, and it's generally ready to go.

That's $525 (at our lowest discounted rate) of time/work for a box that would retail for about $100. It's almost getting to the point where it's just not worth re-installing Windows for people, $340 will buy you a new bare-bones system far more powerful than this machine and $500 would buy you one with a new Windows install. Of course, then there'd still be 3 or 4 hours of installing and profile transfer to do... but the result would be a much better machine.

Upgraded the CD-ROM as well, unfortunately I don't have any Windows software that will recognise the high-end DVD-RW drive as a CD-R-capable drive (she got the drive second-hand). May have to buy that drive off her and put in my old CD-R/RW drive that I know works on Windows.

Got a little bit of work done in the corners around the install, but it's not been a particularly productive day all-in-all. Spent most of the corner time on Cinemon (yay!) mostly the trigger-definition stuff. Anyway, I'm pretty much knackered, but I suppose I should test to see if we can use the CD-R on her box before she gets back to pick it up.