The Halls

I bought this new computer at a local shop last week. It was maybe $20 more then buying all the pieces separately online and having it all shipped. I figured it was worth it in case something didn't work. Well, it doesn't work. I installed XP, and it spontaneously reboots all the time. I haven't been able to install SP2 at all because it always reboots during it's install. It took 4 tries to install XP in the first place. I don't understand it, because knoppix seems to run fine on it, no reboots. The harddrive is only 1 year old, and seems to work fine.
In contrast, the harddrive I had been using for my 2nd mythbox, now that I plan to use the old desktop for that, seems to have died. I kept trying to format the root partition, and it kept puking, and then I go look at the dmesg, and it's full of I/O errors. Great. That drive is < 6 months old, but I know I threw out the receipt, plus I think it only had a 90 day warrenty.
So the short version is I had one older, working desktop, bought a new barebones system, and now I have no working systems at all.
Not exactly how I predicted things to go.

Big poker tournament at my place saturday nite, 8pm. I have 11 seats reserved so far, and somewhere between 7-10 guests people are bringing. So hopefully I will have full capacity, and then I win!
Then I'm off to Chicago again, this time just for some training, so it should only be for a couple days.