Took my Vista/XP Pro dual boot rig into the shop for some general maintenance... to delete a pesky boot entry for XP Home that no longer resides on my machine. Should have been a simple and uncomplicated procedure, right?

Wrong! It came back totally screwed. At first boot, Vista booted up but was slow and unresponsive...ah, a repair install would remedy that, so I thought. Wrong again...the install disc would only go so far and I'd get a BSOD.

Orright then, I'll boot into XP and see what's what in there.... NO GO, zip, nada! The boot ini file was either corrupt or missing. OK, a repair install, perhaps... maybe (being the Vista install failed)...

Oh goody, that works... and eventually XP is up and running... trouble is, the boot entry for Vista is now gone. Ok, no problem, I'll install Vista BootPro and make Vista the default OS. Orright, why can't it find Vista??? I look in 'My Computer' and it's just not there... neither is G: drive with all my documents... nor H: with 86 gigs of music. A check in 'Device Manager' reveals that Windows cannot see the drive, even though it shows up in BIOS as being present.

Me is totally stumped... but I try everything in my (limited) experience to bring it back on line, which was no easy feat at home without any diagnostic tools of any kind. I finally found the HDD, more by accident than design.... sadly, though, the entire drive had to be reformatted for ir to show up in XP, and all on it was lost...well not quite...

I got me one of those data recovery tools (nobody told me it'd take 4 days on a 250gig HDD) and recovered pretty much everything I wanted/needed...tho Vista would still have to be re-written, which was the daunting task because the disc would only load the files before the damn blasted BSOD kicked in....

By now XP was also playing up and running like a hairy goat...suggesting a repair was insufficient and a re-write was also on the cards there. Firstly, however, it was suggested that I had a hardware issue (CPU, MOBO, RAM, etc????) and I needed to resolve that first...

After a process of elimination/trial and error, I determined that the CPU and MOBO were fine, so tried booting up on one stick of RAM... fine, I'll leave out the other 3 1 gig sticks and reinstall XP, which went perfectly/no problems. Ok, now I'll re-introduce the other RAM stick one at a time...yep, sticks 2 and 3 are fine, but stick 4 starts to smell like it's overheating within seconds, so to prevent a major catastrophe I force shut-down the rig and remove it.

Turns out a bad stick of (brand new) RAM prevented Vista from booting/being recognised, but once it was removed the clean install went ahead without issue. I'm almost back to where I was before all this began, just a bit more setting up/a few more proggies to install on each OS and I'll be right again....GRRRRRRRrrrrrrrr!!!!!!

So why didn't I take it back to the shop to get fixed...after all, it was one of them that knackered it, right??? Yep, that's the question I kept asking myself for 5 days or so... WHY OH WHY ME???? Then I pinched myself and remembered they were a staff member down and it wouldn't be looked at much before Jan 3 08. Orright, it's broke, but a broke PC is better than NO PC for somebody who's addicted to having one to play with/customize, etc.

#@*&ing puters... #@*&, #@*&, #@*&!!!!! Rant over... now I'll get back to work on it.