I am back after 3 or 4 days of wrestling with computers.

My laptop where I write a lot of my posts has been a plague for a while, and got to the point where it was unusable.

The problem was that when I had some problems a while back, I fixed it by upgrading to Vista.

Now, let me state that I have two computers in my house, one a laptop, that run Vista flawlessly.  I have no real beefs about the new Windows OS, except one feature I dislike, but that I can live with on my other computers.

The problem is, that my laptop is a bit older (3 years) and it was not designed to run Vista.  So when I ran the upgrade adviser it passed, but only barely did it meet the requirements. 

So in effect, I had to dumb Vista down immensely, and even then, it was slow and chunky.

Well, in returning it to Windows XP, where it ran fast and good, I ran into a problem, a kind of IT catch 22.  Essentially, I found that I could not upgrade, obviously, and my first two attempts to do a parallel install left me with so much Vista legacy stuff on the hard drive that Windows XP was slightly unstable.  The real problem was that without a Floppy drive, I had a hard time formatting the hard drive and reinstalling.  You see, I could not use the Windows setup program to format the hard drive, as all of its temp install files were installed to the hard drive.

I needed an old school boot disk, a floppy with the utilities that I needed that could boot the computer independently.  Normally a simple thing…when you have a floppy disk drive…which I didn’t.

Finally I had to make a bootable CD ROM that contained an image of a Windows 98 boot disk, making this in effect a Windows 98 boot cd.  I also copied the core Windows XP files to that CD when I burned it.