Stigmergic Web

A few days ago, I got a BSOD on the old Wintel laptop. I’ve had the computer for nearly 4 years, and this is the first BSOD that I’ve got on it. Sadly, it may also be the last.

This particular BSOD informed me that my Windows registry was … well, I think I can summarize by saying that the registry is hooped! Thankfully, I’ve had the new Mactel laptop for over a month, and I’ve been using it for a lot of day to day stuff. The only hitch was that a lot of my files – from University, for school and some family pictures – were still on the hard drive of the old laptop. Most had not been backed up.

My first task, then, before I started poking around on the hard drive, was to back up all that stuff. Faced with a corrupted registry and an un-bootable computer, most people would probably give up, cry or call their local PC repair shop. Luckily, I had an old Ubuntu Live CD so I didn’t need to do any of these three things! A bit of googling gave me the instructions to mount the Windows (NTFS) hard drive (I’ll put instructions up soon if I remember) so I could copy the files over to a USB external 120 GB drive. This went smoothly.

Now that my data is safe, I am faced with a decision – what to do with the old computer? As I see it, I have three choices:

1. Try to fix the registry. My computer creates restore points every week, so if I can move the old registry files and insert the repair registry files, I should be just fine. Sadly, I haven’t figured out how to do this yet using Ubuntu. I hear that Knoppix is good for this, so I may give it a try. Any other suggestions for repair CDs would be useful.
2. Re-install the system from scratch. The CDs that came with the laptop will reformat the drive and re-install the original installation. Sadly, they will not allow me to do a simple fix of the registry as it currently exists.
3. Remove the Redmond virus once and for all from the laptop, and just install Ubuntu. If I do this, I may just get a bigger hard drive while I’m at it.