I file this, laughingly, under the 'tech' category purely because I deliberately haven’t set up a ‘My computer hates me and I hate it’ category. If I did, you’d be deluged by my complaints, so I figure that it’s best we don’t go there.

Over the last few months, my computer - my ageing, greying (beiging?) Win98SE (don’t laugh!) box - has become increasingly decrepit, falling down several times a day and generally suffering from senility. Frequently it would forget where it put something and I’d lose work. More often than not, the mere act of collecting my mail would be enough to send it into a seizure.

Over the last few weeks, I have been whining about this in #joiito, and the general consensus of opinion was ‘get a mac’, advice I believe luminaries such as David Weinberger are more than familiar with. Sadly, I have not the pfennigs to get a mac, and the other advice put the fear of Windows into me. Reinstall, they said. Or worse, upgrade.

Well, upgrading is out right now. I don’t have the time or energy to learn to deal with WinXP (which surely should be called WinSpawnOfSatan), or even 2K. 98SE may be flawed, and undoubtedly it’s very flawed, but it’s not quite as flawed as my life right now, so better the devil you know.

Today, my patience finally ran out, and I decided to reinstall. I was expecting pain and suffering and wailing and crying and gnashing of teeth. In actual fact, it all went rather smoothly. The only thing that (I have so far noticed) got b0rken in the process was Norton Internet Security (Security? Ha ha ha!), which was easy enough to sort out.

There are no guarantees that this will have fixed my problem. But, well, so far so good.

Fingers crossed that the blood sacrifice (I bit my lip during the reinstall) worked.

UPDATE: So far, the only breakage has been Actinic web shop, which now no longer even opens, let alone works. *sigh* I knew I wouldn't get away with it scot free.

LATER: Palm Desktop broke too, but at least I've managed to fix that.

3 JUN: Fixed Actinic. No loss of data. Phew!