computer woes (give a guy a screwdriver and he is happy)

I'm using my old computer atm, my usual one has given up the ghost. =(

Started with a random crashes, then crashed whilst defragging hard-drive, which then gave me Blue Screen of Death!

Found out my comp was over-heating, fan on my mobo over the north/southbridge (?!) had given up, also my cheap liquid-cooling unit might have been on the blink. So with a bit of cash and the will to learn i set about trying to set things right.

The only replacement motherboard i could find was a load of pants, thus giving me a great excuse to upgrade. Yay!

Purchased a new mobo, quad core cpu, asus V60 cpu cooler and 4 gigs of DDR2 ram, woohoo! Upgrading these components scared the hell out of me, but seems the whole thing went well.....Untill i couldn't boot to Windows XP =p Either have corrupted boot files or a damaged hard-drive, but with no Windows disc, as my comp was bought retail, there is no way of repairing boot files and i have no idea if both hard-drives (raid 0 striped array) are working.

So a determination to do things myself and not go to a shop and look like a noob for getting silly things fixed.....i've ordered 2 x 500GB hard-drives and a copy of vista 64 bit. (In response to any vista haters, i have a DX10 compatable gpu, and the 64 bit version will make full use of 4 gigs of ram).

So this weekend i have the joyous task of setting my hard-drives to a raid 1 mirrored array and installing a new operating system. =s

If all works out ok i will have saved at the very least about £500 over a new pc, so keep your fingers crossed for me! =)

Wish me luck, i'm sure you will either receive tales of utter woe, or something along the lines of 'OMG! I am so pro!!!1' =p

sorry to hear about that, but i hope your new box is up and about soon. i built a pc a while back, and put all kinds of neon in it, and then threw in extra fans so it sounded like a helicopter taking off. sold it to a friend a while back.

i'm a mac guy now, thru and thru.

Mac Mr. I like that.

If i ever see Bill Gates i'm gonna shove vista up his ass then kick his butt till it pops out his mouth!

(can you tell i'm just a little bit annoyed?)

sounds like it. don't fear, there is a new os on the way, and it should compound your problems nicely.

too bad linux is linux, or you could switch.