In case you were wondering where I've been, I decided to switch back to XP from Vista.

Should have taken about 2 hours total to get back into gear, but oh no.  Plenty of problems along the way.

The biggest problem being a bad hard drive.  Windows XP setup formatted my hard drive and copied the setup files to start installing XP.  It required a restart, and when I got back I got the error message "error reading disk" or "disk error", I forget. 

The only thing it could be from what I read online is a bad sector in the hard drive.  But after running things like chkdsk /mbr, trying to repair the hard drive, formatting in different ways, switching the hard drive in the BIOS from LBA to Large (don't even know what that means...), nothing.

So I bought a new hard drive last night finally, and XP installed successfully.  Now I'm just having issues installing drivers, especially the ethernet driver...so I can't seem to get online as hard as I try.

I'm guessing after another night of this I'll be back up and running though.

Well you're not the only who was having problems, I just bought a new power supply and I might be building myself a new PC.

Welcome back. I feel as comfortable working on my PC as I do my car....and I take that to a mechanic even for my oil changes. Good luck and may the Chozo guide you in your understanding.

lol n00b pwned

Haha, just kidding. If you need any help come back to us or pm, we can try to help ;>

Haha and to think I was waiting to downgrade to XP to see how it worked out for you.  Guess I won't be doing it for a little while.

Yeah, well, I'm guessing it should work fine for you.

Apparently Maxtor hard drives suck, and that's what I had. Circuit City had a 500 GB Seagate for $120 last night, and it was either that or a 120 GB for $80...not a hard decision really, the 500 GB is 24 cents per GB, the 120 GB is 67 cents per GB...I always go for 20 cents/GB as a good deal.

I had no problems with the new hard drive, but I can't find my mobo driver CD, so I have to find them online, and for some stupid reason they're all split up into separate driver packages.

I'm guessing I'll be all set by tonight if I'm home by a reasonable time, I did put TF2 on my jump drive so I'll be all set to play a goddamn game after 2 nights without it hehe.

Why would you want to downgrade? DirectX 10!!

Well things like this happens (My XP instalation destroyed my personal files in my linux partition)...

Hehe, XP is faster and easier to work with.

I have my Vista CD if I ever want to "upgrade" again.

And reformatting is nice...gets rid of all the stuff I don't use anymore.

yeah, that's why I stuck w/ XP Pro vs Vista Ult, when I built my new pc. After some discussion I just held on to my original thought that Vista just isn't ready yet and I'll stick w/ XP for now.