Company Slacker

So, I recently bought a second 512 MB ram stick to use with windows 98 which I thought would help with the lag problems the wife experiences while playing WoW. This created quite a series of unforunate effects:

1. When I opened the PC to insert the stick I found it to be incredibly dusty. So I pulled all of the components and gave it a good cleaning. Reassembled, re-booted and black screen. OK, didn’t get good POST so I figure something isn’t properly seated.
2. Reseated everything and Lilo thankfully pops up. Boot into Mandriva and it runs smooth. Big relief. Re-boot into windows and it too runs ok.
3. I fire up WoW and it appears to be faster. So I think I’m home free.
4. The wife wants an old trouble maker installed, CD-Stomper, ’cause she just gots to have it. This damn thing is suspected to have spyware which is why I gave it the boot orginally. So I re-install just to prove to her that it’s crap.
5. Windows crashes on the Wife during WoW. Naturally I think its the CD-Stomper so I try to un-fuck the system by removing it. However that doesn’t seem to help so I start tearing out my hair and beating on the keyboard.
6. I say to myself, fuck it, and prepare for a re-install. Back up the critical data of both linux and windows onto a usb/IDE drive. I’ve got the partition info on a floppy and mandriva cd has a rescue disk. Which I will need because that damn windows installed over-writes the boot sector.
7. Deleted the windows directory and popped in the win98 cd and rebooted. Holy crap it isn’t bootable and I don’t have a dos boot disk! After a furious search I find a boot disk.
8. Installed with no problems and seems to run fine. Spent a few hours installing drivers and then re-boot with the mandriva cd to restire the bootloader.
9. Oh shit, mandriva encounters an error. WTF!
10. Fine! I’ll reformat the entire fucking drive and do re-installs of both O/S.
11. Using the win98 fdisk I removed the existing partitions but ran into a snag because the disk size isn’t being recognized by fdisk. WTF!
12. So I waste a bunch of time reading my Mueller book and fdisk tutorials. I find out that the win98 fdisk can’t handle large volumes. So know I have to boot into linux but not mandriva because its gone. Luckily I have both Puppy and Damn Small live CDs. I use one of their fdisks to partition the drive. I choose FAT 32 LBA for the whole disk because I know I can get mandriva to repartition when it installs. Cool!
13. I do a re-install (Win98 reported a probloem with the disk but it ‘fixed it’ and procedded with install) get the updates, and install the WoW (takes about an hour just for that). But the damn windows starts doing its crashing thing again.
14. My son reports that a friend of his says that windows 98 can’t handle more than 512 MB. I check this out and sure as shit it won’t. Crap!
15. OK, I’ll grab an ISO of win2K off emule and give that a whirl. Found one with service pack 4 which burned out nicely.
16. On install, win2k wants to use NTFS which I surely do not want as I want to read/write from within linux so it allows the FAT 32 and off we go. Get the updates and it seems to run fine.
17. Re-install Mandriva which goes quite well. This time I install Grub as the boot loader. Cool!
18. Back into windows 2K: I can’t get any of the three firewalls to allow the DSL connection software access to internet. WTF! Found fricking spyware in the WINNT directories. Shit, that’s what I get for using a cracked win2k iso.
19. So I go back to win98 but when I do so I discover that the FAT 32 that I thought I had put on was now FAT 16. WTF? Could that have been the win2k problem after all. By this time I’m so through fucking with it. I correct the file system with the linux partition manager which I didn’t realize would also put on the filesystem. It did it in like 5 seconds. (Why then does it take DOS like 1/2 hour?)
20. So win98 is now installed for the WoW sessions and I have an extra memory stick here on the desk.

Yesterday I bought a winXP disk on ebay and will take a crack at that this weekend maybe. Hope it’s not another fiasco.