My little notebook computer finally hit the skids over the weekend. The breaking point came with the attempted installation of a PCMCI card to read my memory stick. The OS found the new hardware and installed it, but on the restart, the piece of shit collapsed. All I got was some inexplicable input/output error. I couldn't get to the fricken' desktop. The thing was hosed.

The solution, long in coming, was to upgrade to Windows 2000. There only reason I waited this long was that I was afraid I was going to lose some applications and some of my files, especially all the Samoa pictures (1500+).

I went over to Sio's place on Saturday, borrowed some of his disks. began the lang haul of reinstalling. There was a moment of trepidation after the Windows 2000 installation because when I first booted up, there was nothing on the desktop nor the start menu. I freaked for a second. But I manged to hunt all the files down. The only casualties were a few applications (Cold Fustion Studio, Palm, etc.) for which I didn't bring the CD to Samoa. I'll figure out how to reinstall them somewhere.

I moved all the valuable files onto Sio's machince using his 1 GIG microdrive and then we burned everything on CD. So now, the computer is saved and all the files are in a safe place. Fa'afetai le Atua!