Earlier this year, I posted an article on creating an unattended XP installation disc. I was at a point where I needed to reinstall Windows, so I went ahead with that project and created an up-to-date copy of XP that installed without me needing to be there (hence, 'unattended').

Well, besides MSTSC support that mysteriously didn't get installed, my copy of XP seemed to be quirk free...until now. Over the last 6 months, I've watched as my computer slowly fell apart from the inside out. In the last month alone, I've had to deal with a Firefox profile that...deleted...itself? I dunno what happened, but the toolbars were all organized differently and my booksmarks were deleted. I was able to restore Firefox to working condition, but today my 200GB Maxtor harddrive failed to write files twice, forcing a hard reboot each time. At one point during reboot, BIOS didn't even recognize the drive, reporting it as an apostrophe instead of its model name. Windows wouldn't boot with the bad drive attached, so I thought I was totally screwed.

Its like my computer doesn't want to do its job anymore. I had moved all my important personal files to the faulty harddrive before[/i] it was faulty, since it was newer than my primary drive and I wanted to have my files seperate from the harddrive that contained the OS. As luck would have it, the drive was recognized after being unplugged for about an hour, so I took what little time I had left with the drive to transfer all of My Documents, all of my [i]web sites in localhost root (talk about a near heart attack!!!), all my music, and my collection of RvB.

Now, I just have to get some money together to purchase a new harddrive to replace the one that kept freeking out; I'm not about to risk anymore files to a hard drive that intermittently works...oh, and in relation to the title, I suppose most of the problems can be contributed to the method I used to install XP this time around.

Can you believe I've installed XP a total of six times on this machine? Its only been, what, 2.5 years since I built it, and I'm preparing for a seventh reinstallation of my OS. As I told a friend recently: "Windows is like a really bitchy but super hawt girl...so many things to do with her, but sometimes its just too much to deal with"