XP, yeah. Turns out there are plenty of Finnish ones as well, so all we need now is an external DVD drive. Since they cost less than a new PC, I'm guessing she'll consider it a price worth paying. First, though, I'll try to format the thing and see if it manages to reinstall itself despite my pessimism.

If you have a disc copy of XP already can't you install it with that and the laptop's CD key? You might be able to install it via a flash drive, but I'm not sure. I haven't tried it.

My mom once found my 20gig collection of porn...

It is indeed possible. There are a couple of softwares that will let you make a bootable XP flashdrive from a valid installation media.
Or you could even switch to a nice Linux distro. Just ensure you remove all existing partitions, create new linux partitions and , hop, done.

That sounds promising. Is there any particular software I should use or are they all just as good?

I haven't seen the state of the netbook yet. She doesn't know anything about computers and I'm useless at talking to people, so I can't decipher over the phone whether XP won't boot or if the power button isn't responding, but I'll see soon enough. Here's hoping it's the former.

Yeah I'm sorry for you man but water cooling is best left to the experts.
...

I wrote my wedding speech on my PC, thinking I would print it out on the day, unfortunately that fateful morning the machine started to shut down for no apparent reason, leaving me to do my speech entirely from memory. When I found time to troubleshoot it after the event it transpired the dog had been at one of the cables.

In the end my speech ended up been something along the line of "Due to the wonders of modern technology I have fuck all to say, thanks for coming" needless to say I hit the bar shortly afterwards.

You could even do it without a specific tool

http://discuss.pcmag.com/forums/thread/1004417525.aspx

but somehow, tools are made to make your life simpler :

http://myeeeguides.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/winsetupfromusb-install-windows-xp-from-usb-flash-drive/

A few weeks ago, I woke up to find a portable hard drive on the floor. One of my cats sometimes sits on a windowsill near the computer, and has fallen from there a few times while asleep. I captured this photo about two seconds before she did it again. Her head just drooped down, I snapped the photo, then BAM! Yeah, my wallpaper needs replacing.

Anyway, the drive doesn't seemed to be damaged. It wasn't plugged in at the time. I can't afford a new external HD right now.

LMAO

When I was a young, impressionable lad that was just hitting puberty I decided it would be a good idea to try and locate the nude raider patch for Tomb Raider. One system restore later I learned a very valuable lesson on what I should and shouldn't look up.

One time around 3 in the mourning i was looking for a no cd crack for a game ( well i droped it on the floor forgot about it then ran it over with my computer chair ) And I usually know what i'm doing I wont lie i pirated most of the games i now own on GoG so i found Age of Empires 3 War chiefs nocd.exe its 3am so i thought oh sweet auto installer.. my computer gets hosed by virus's lucky i did a system restore.