Now that we have broadband internet at my house and a home LAN, I can fix my old computer. I backed up all my documents and mp3s to my laptop, and then burned the files onto CDs (it took 7 of them!). The first day I screwed up and loaded Windows XP without reformatting the hard drive. When my moniter wouldn't work, I decided to put Windows 98 back on, again without reformatting the hard drive. So once it started working again, I noticed that both operating systems were on my computer in the same partition. This is bad news, because things could start to conflict. Plus I still had all the shitty programs that I was trying to get rid of.

After a few days of thinking about the problem, I realized that the first step was to reformat the hard drive. Last night I did that. Everything went pretty smoothly, but my computer doesn't recognize my modem now (not that I really care about modems right now). I was very happy that the computer recognized my moniter, CD-ROM drive, and network adapter. Then I spent most of the rest of the night installing programs from the Windows 98 CD, Windows Update, and other internet programs like WinZip, Adobe Acrobat Reader, PowerPoint Viewer, and Kazaa. I also loaded Works Suite 2002, which came with my laptop, because it has a full version of Word, although the spreadsheet program sucks ass. Everything seems to be working really well now, and my computer is much faster. I'm happy with how everything turned out.

This morning I finished copying all my backup files to the hard drive. I'm also running a little Kazaa test over the weekend to see how downloading files at home compares to downloading files at ASU (which Kelly made me stop doing).

I'd like to do the same thing to Kelly's computer, because it's running worse than mine was, and her monitor driver is not working correctly. I also need to clean her mouse, which I keep forgetting to do.