Media PC Woes

So the Media PC is still dead. A friend of ours helped me fix it and it was working for a day and then it died again. I can hopefully get the drive to work long enough to save our music, but I've spent the last 4 hours trying to fix it again, and failing utterly. Sarah's parents were too kind and gave us a little money, and I just earned a decent freelance paycheck, so we went shopping after work to look at other media PCs. So, every god damn machine has Windows Vista now. I really don't want to go with Vista. It turns out that my awesome and still functional external sound card has no drivers under Vista and probably won't. So I wouldn't really be able to hook up any Vista machine to my surround sound system without buying a new sound card for it in addition to the $1000 cost of the computer itself.

If I could just get our important files off the machine, I could try installing a fresh copy of windows on the machine and see if that fixes the problem. The stupid Gateway restore disk formats the entire drive. No other option. Just lovely.

God. Nothing is so frustrating as having a machine that you can't fix. I could spend hundreds having an "expert" decide he/she can't fix it, or I can spend five times that and replace it with a new machine (and damn well get the 3 year warranty on that one).

Maybe we just won't replace the damn thing. Go back to reading books full time and give up the glass teat.

Yeah right.