I'm a Mac and I'm a PC

The beloved Dell I bought four years ago has, for the recent past, been acting up in not-fun ways. It would suddenly stop in the middle of several programs, freeze, then switch over to a blue screen which wasn't exactly the Blue Screen of Death since I could reboot and get everything back on line (note: though now that I look at the picture accompanying the Wiki entry, that's exactly what my screen looks like, so maybe I am getting the BSOD). Annoying but I could live with it. Of course I've been quietly backing up everything onto and external hard drive and burning DVD's to make sure when the system finally craps out, I haven't really lost much. But in the past month, my reboots don't always take on the first or second time and this past weekend, it took me six times to get the reboot to take and the system to start up.

As a last ditch effort, I decided to go ahead and wipe out the hard-drive and reinstall the XP operating system this weekend, so I gathered all my disks and notes from previous OS installs and sat down with a big cup of coffee to have at it...only to be told, succinctly, via a black screen of ass, that damage to one of the partitioned drives wouldn't allow me to reinstall the OS. Fucker. And that was that. My skills at PC-doctoring only go so far and reinstalling an OS is about as far as I go. My only conclusion is that my C: drive is and has been damaged and there is nothing I can do about it. Weighing options and being completely afraid of Windows Vista horror stories (and lets be honest, nothing has been more effective then the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC Apple commercials for scaring the bejeezus out of PC users), Jeff and I are making the switch. We ordered this 20" gorgeous piece of heaven yesterday.