Seems I've left changing out the (pretty elderly) hard drives on my pc until it was too late :( She who must be obeyed called me at work to say my PC has 'died', seems it's doing a passable impression of a Norwegian Blue ::)

One of the drives has been noisy for a while and it would seem (sods law) it was the one with the operating system on it >:( Unfortunately I haven't backed up the PC for quite a while.... so lots has been lost :-[

However I won't know for sure until I get home and try and get the wee bast*rd going again. As it was planned/needed anyway I have bought a new 500gb hard drive from eBuyers with another (maybe a 250, we'll see) to follow shortly to give me more space than I'll probably ever use.

But the tricky question is................... do I take this as an opportunity to go out and buy Vista............... or do I just re-install XP

Worst time of the year for this to happen as well :'( Guess the wife will have to make do with a box of pringles and a tin of coke for Christmas ;D

keep xp!! i hate vista!!

vista stops your control over windows more so than xp, which is really annoying as i like to get dep inside a system and make sure everything is ok from time to time! vista wont let me do this >:( >:(

Thats because vista has a very good security system on board to stop your grubby little fingers tampering with it .we got vista at home here and had it for over a year now and we find it fine ..

I have Vista on my laptop, and I hated it at first, but now I'm used to it it's not that bad, although all I use it for is web surfing really. My missus plays crazy taxi on it, and it works fine :P

maybe peter could install vista to his gsr kits. red might not be able to cut them up so easily. ;D

wana bet!! Lol! ;D

Thanks for the feedback guys :D I have been overwhelmingly advised to give Vista a wide berth for the moment and stick with XP - so I will ;)

But I'm still in something of a quandry and when I got home after a 12 hr nightshift and started the bast*rding computer up it turns out it's not the hard drives at all.... it's XP that's dead :o
And the noise I thought was a dying hard drive? Fan on the motherboard which quietens down quickly....

So the XP operating system had keeled over and died. Utterly kaput. It had ceased to be it breathed no more. The good news is that all the data that I though was lost off the drives is still there (discovered after trial re-installing XP to recover data) and "safe" ;D

The bad news is I have I will have to start everything from scratch yet again when the new hard drive turns up and re-install every programme again :( I have absolutely not the foggiest idea why XP should have taken an 'eppy'.... but it had :groananim

And I thought Italian cars and Red heads were 'tempremental' - guess I was wrong ::)


PS - Linux ???

i have vista on my laptop and quite like it.

[quote author=stilosporting link=topic=653.msg4429#msg4429 date=1196202369]
maybe peter could install vista to his gsr kits. red might not be able to cut them up so easily. ;D
[/quote]

Loving that one LMAO :applause