Never, ever volunteer.

What a weekend. Not that I did anything terribly exciting at all, but I'm still ready to go to bed and I'm completely exhausted. For the past few weeks, I've been trying to fix a relative's PC. It's been a struggle since day one, to be honest. First of all, trying to find the actual error which was causing the PC to reset itself about 90% of the way into booting up took ages and turned out to be faulty RAM (or at least incorrectly seated RAM). That took about 10 days. So off it trundled to relative HQ, only to be returned immediately. "It's still broken" cried the bastards.

Was it fuck! So I fiddled with it a bit more – updated the BIOS, fragmented the hard drive and generally made sure it was running as well as it could (and that's not to say it's great – P3 450Mhz. 256MB Ram and Windows XP are not a good combo).

I sent it back to them in the best health it's been in since they bought it. But, oh no, that's not fucking good enough, is it? "The modem doesn't work!" they moaned "Reinstall Windows for us... and we want new anti-virus software, too!"

Can't these people just reinstall the fucking drivers?

Now... that was all two weeks ago. It's taken me two fucking weeks to reinstall Windows XP. I have no idea why the PC didn't like it (there were about half a dozen different reasons I could find why, but can't narrow it down any more than that). Ordinarily, it's a 2 hour job at the most, but two fucking weeks? Give me a break!

So, I was sitting at my PC today, staring at some lovelies when I got an SMS message from my cousin asking after the PC. This is the same family who told me that they'd give me space to look at it, no pressure, and I'd call them when it's done. Fuckers.

Call it Murphy's Law or whatever, but I decided to give it one last go because they're family. Doesn't fucking Windows fucking install? Gaaaaaaaa! OK, so I'm a bit pleased (because a week ago I wasn't going to let this wanker beat me) and so off I go to install the bare minimum of software (you know the score – anti-virus, adobe acrobat, a graphics package and some home office software) only to find that Windows doesn't actually want anything to be installed onto it.

It was at that point that I gave up, sent an SMS to my cousin pronouncing the PC to be dead. It is an ex-PC. No, it's not fucking sleeping, it's dead. Here's something for free - if they're looking a new PC built, they can fuck off and look elsewhere...