Over the weekend I had to rebuild my PC.  Generally, I wouldn’t have a clue how to go about doing this so it’s handy that I have an IT Guy close at hand to supervise.  This I insisted on, rather than leave him to it.   I’ve been concerned about my growing inability to understand what my pc is doing and why, and decided that building it up from the beginning would help understand.  Not the intricate details of how the programming side of it works, but at least I’d have some conciousness of how it fitted together and in particular the utilities loaded on it.   We decided to install another disc drive so we could isolate the operating system from the apps should another corruption occur (the reason for the rebuild).  Also decided to add a UPS, to even out power spikes and troughs – a potential source of some very strange behaviour on the part of my PC.

I have to say that it’s liberating – even though a little time consuming, I feel a bit more familiar with my PC, mostly from the process of working out why everything didn’t work perfectly the first time.

I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to have a go, providing you have some supervision available.

Even though I don’t understand it any better, it’s not such a mystery any more.  And I can share in the disbelieve that to load Windows XP you need to have a floppy disc drive.  Who has one of those lying around these days? (OK, we do but lots of people wouldn’t, and if you needed to – can you buy them anymore?)