oh my god...

It's been ages since I messed around with a Windows machine. My friend got herself a new Windows laptop a couple of months ago and she has proceeded to make a complete mess of it. She asked me to fix it up for her. I was quite excited at the prospect of playing with a new computer. I have spent about four hours on it so far and it is still no where ready for her to have back. First off, I thought I would do a nice clean install of Windows XP, but could I work out how to repartition the hard drive. I remember that I used to be able to use FDISK but after a bit of searching on the internet, apparently this is no longer available under XP. In the end I allowed the machine to kind of install another version of the OS. There are now two system folders and I am being offered the option of starting up from either, which is a bit odd given that at least one of them doesn't work.

The best bit is that I can not set up a wireless, or any, connection to the internet. It is all driving me a bit mad, not to mention the fact that I now feel a teeny weeny bit guilty because she will now have machine that is in worse condition than when she gave it to me, but I really do have to go to bed now. I have tried to make up for it by sorting out her music and giving her a nice copy of Office. Hopefully that will go some way to helping her feel a bit better when I tell her she can't connect to the internet, and that she will have to sort it out by herself.

While I have been working on this machine I keep finding myself thinking that I could do this on the mac or that on the mac, or even better, I have no idea how to do this, but the mac just does it for me. For example, I have rarely given my internet connection a second thought since I got into macs. I am not trying to bash Windows here, but it really is true, macs just work.