Geek!

I am a huge geek. I knew this already, but sometimes things happen that drive it home. Here’s the latest geekery.

My home PC runs Windows 98 SE. I bought the computer with it on there four years ago, more or less, and have never reinstalled.
Windows geeks will know what that means: an unstable, unhappy computer with some VxD issues.
I finally snapped and decided to just frickin’ quit talking about upgrading to XP and just DO it. When it turned out I had nothing to do at work for a bit, I got the time off and started.
My plan: mirror my harddrive (which is 250Gb, but I’m only using about 40Gb), do a clean install, then reload the data I need off the mirror. Easy, right?
Not.
A coworker gave me a 40Gb drive he didn’t need, and I spent ALL my time off trying to make it work. I gained a greater understanding of how to install a harddrive but unfortunatley failed to install it because it had (when I finally wised up and ran Norton Disk Doctor on it) an approximately infinite number of bad clusters on it. *sigh*
On the bright side, this meant I had an excuse to go to Fry’s Electronics, aka Geek Mecca.
I went to Frys, where I acquired:

• Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, full version
• Norton System Works in a bundle with Norton Personal Firewall (I don’t need the firewall, but the bundle, after mail-in rebate, is about $19.99, which is WAY better than the $99.99 pricetag on System Works by itself)
• A 160 Gb harddrive

Yeah, I got a drive four times bigger than I really needed.
Why?
Because it was only $20 more than a 40Gb drive. How lame is that? $60 for a 40Gb drive or $80 for a 160Gb drive! (Well, after mail-in rebate, anyway. I’m going to be a rebate expert too by the time this is over!) I got all excited, and then felt like a total geek.
On the bright side, I know have .41 terabytes of space on my system now.
.41 TERABYTES.
Wow.
Last night I successfully installed the drive and ran Norton Ghost to do the clone. Tonight I will check the clone, and (if it worked correctly) install XP. Very exciting. ‘course, with my luck the clone won’t have worked and I’ll need to redo it all and won’t be able to install XP for a week. That would suck, ‘cos my roomie’s Mac is in the shop (has been for a week, too, so I don’t want to hear A GODDAMN THING from any Mac evangelists for at LEAST a month! Macs can break too, so there!) so she’s depending on my system for internet… and while it’s mid-clone or mid-test or mid-upgrade, it’s unavailable to BOTH of us.
A weekend without internet! Nooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!
But the sad part, the really sad part, the part that shows I am a great big huge nerdy geek:
I am actually enjoying this, even when I’m having trouble making things work. I’m having a good time and I love learning all this crazy hardware stuff.
I am such a geek.