Computer down! Computer down!

The wife's PC finally died on her. Her LCD said it wasn't getting a signal so my first (hopeful) thought was the video card. Alas a quick switch from the video card to the onboard GPU did not work. So I crack the case, pull the card, reboot and...nothing.

Bugger.

That didn't narrow the problem down, it just eliminated one possibility. With Liz's PC being quite a few years old, the cost of trouble-shooting and getting it up & running would probably be more than the cost of a new PC. So I went the cheap route: I pulled her hard drive and dropped it into my PC.

Unfortunately they're making cases smaller & smaller these days (or so it seems) and with my BFG of a video card (an 8800GT or something cutting edge a few years ago) tucked in I had a hell of a job sliding her HDD into my drive bay. After unplugging a few cables I finally got it in, hooked everything back up, then hit the power button.

Nothing.

Oh, shit.

I/O Power switch on the PSU? Flipped it. Nothing. Flipped it back.Still nothing.

Oh yeah. One of the cables I unplugged was the power to Mother Board, and yes, after getting the IDE ribbon cable plugged in I forgot to plug in the MoBo's power cable. With that plugged back in my computer booted up, then rebooted itself. That's odd.

Windows failed to start properly on the last attempt.
Safe mode?
Safe mode with Networking?
Normal?

Huh? Oh, okay. Let's push our luck and shoot for Normal.

No dice. Reboot, and...Windows failed to start properly on the last attempt.
Ok, ok. Safe Mode?

Reboot.

I hit F1 went into BIOS and reconfigured the Boot order. Save & Exit.

Reboot, but this time I meant to do that.

And the familiar XP loading screen came up. Cool.

Windows loaded. Opened My Computer, and there was a bunch of drives (I have a built-in flash drive reader that will accept pretty much any standard flash card), followed by a new drive. A J: drive. Opening it up revealed it was the wife's hard drive, so I had access to her files. Cool. (Fezzes are cool, too.)

I shut my PC down then switched her non-working case with mine, because the printer/fax/scanner is on her desk and it refuses to network with the LAN. Stubborn piece of tech.

When I booted up my PC, or Liz's new PC rather, it detected the Printer and after a minute or two it had installed the drivers. Then it detected the Printer again. And wanted to install the drivers, again. Wha??? Oh, I see. It's a Printer/Fax/Scanner so it needs to install it three times. Fine. And so it did.

Today Liz called me up in tears because she'd opened up Firefox and it was my Firefox. With my bookmarks, logins & passwords. Then she opened up Thunderbird and it was empty. No emails. No addresses. Nothing. Nada. Zip. She was a little distraught that everything was gone and it took a while to calm her down. It's not gone, it's on the J drive, I told her. But I might as well have been speaking Kobold, or COBOL (which sound the same), for all the good it did.

Fortunately a few minutes searching found a website where, hopefully, I'll be able to restore her profile, including emails & email addresses, from the Thunderbird folder on her old hard drive.

So now I currently have no computer, but oddly enough, I don't really care. After quitting WoW, again, and playing LOTRO for a bit, I've discovered I've lost a lot of my desire to play games on my PC. Or maybe it's that Dragon Quest IX has sucked me in ;)

*edit* Mozilla Profiles restored, and now Liz has her Firefox and Thunderbird back. Hooray!