It's more fun to compute

My laptop woes are over - almost!

The overheating problem was solved by opening the laptop, removing the heatsink/heat exchanger, removing the fans, blowing out the obscene amount of dust, cleaning the fans, and putting the whole mess back together. I removed dust from the inside of the laptop, which somehow seemed to fix my DVD-RW drive.

With the thermal problem fixed (it actually blows cool air now) I could take care of data recovery. I played around a little with a partition wizard to fix the partition table and that did the trick. When I rebooted, the partition was recognized and Windows miraculously salvaged orphan files. If only my other repair attempts worked so easy...

There are still a few corrupt Windows startup files I need to take care of, so I begrudgingly installed internet drivers on this partition (never my intention - this is my audio-only partition) so I can install Windows SP2 and hopefully move over fresh copies of the bad files. If not, it's not a big deal - all the important stuff is intact. Actually, it might be nice to just work off this partition - it's so clean, it's like a fresh install.

Now I have a reason to buy a new hard drive and more RAM - and then install Linux =D. I probably sound like a huge nerd right now, but i'm really not that into computers. It's just a relief to get these things done.

The icing on the cake: the computer repairs was accompanied by a wonderful tequila.