I wanted to do so much gaming this week and, well, I have 3 stars in Mario Galaxy. Granted, I’ve been playing in random hockey tournaments and doing some short runs and a lot of other good things with people so it’s not a wash by any stretch. I’ve also learned a crapton about Vista thanks to upgrading my brother’s Dell laptop from XP to Vista Ultimate and I just watched in amazement as it all crashed and burned in every way possible. I mean, I’ve been doing tech work since grade school and I’ve never seen anything go so awry. Boxing Day night turns into the next morning and my dad and I are scouring the net and trying every trick we know to try and salvage any scrap of my brother’s data possible.

Miraculously, through a massive team effort, the important stuff gets recovered and I had all of his music backed up on my 500GB Western Digital MyBook so we didn’t bother trying to find any of it. Then we did what we should’ve done in the first place which was wipe the whole system clean and start fresh. I hate upgrades. I backed up everything, formatted, then reinstalled XP on my tower this past summer just because ‘it was time’. My brother is pretty happy now though. His PC is running faster than ever and I knew he’d be a big fan of Aero so that’s working out great. I’m still kicking myself for not putting my foot down and insisting on a proper backup before the upgrade (bad geek, I know, trust me) but he was so cavalier about not needing anything on that HD that I assumed he had backups. Whoops. On the plus side, the crash course in Vista was nice and educational :)