186.
I am heartily sick of my computer's indefatigable and nauseabundo efforts to cause me grief, and am seriously considering sending it to the cuchillero to be taught a lesson. Today was a largely wasted day - which was a shame, because we had good weather. My only foray out of doors was to the computer store (again) and the supermarket (again). I know you are curious to know what went wrong this time. Well, let me tell you. Yesterday, not long after I had uploaded my photos, my computer suddenly rebooted - or rather, it tried to reboot, but couldn't get past the memory check screen without telling me that my hard-disk was about to fail. On pressing F1, the computer just rebooted. This went on for some time - I was desperate not to lose my data. I eventually got it runnning just long enough to save my important files to CD. So, today was spent installing a new hard-drive, then re-installing the OS (which involved a call to the Microsoft customer service centre in Bombay to reactivate my XP). The worst was reinstalling all of my software. It annoys me that 99.9 percent of the time you need to stay glued to the monitor just to click the continue button every 10 minutes. So, that has been my day. Stuck inside the house tickling the insides of my old PC, and trying to cajole it into behaving better in future. I have everything crossed that can be crossed... so here's hoping that this is it finally repaired.