So this weekend I was sure that the computer gods were frowning upon me because, as of Saturday, I had three broken machines that needed fixing. This is in addition to my main workstation at home which is down until MSI returns my replacement board. My in-law's machine was just not coming on, I got my Xbox stuck in PAL mode (stupid Europe) and when I got home on Friday I discovered that my laptop had a corrupted partition.

Well I got the in-law's machine home, hooked it up and it worked perfectly for me. At first I surmised that the problem was in their monitor (which I have already told them is on its last legs), but after talking to Jimmy it sounds like the machine may have just needed some time in the corner to think about it actions.

The Xbox is still stuck in PAL mode. I tried a few techniques I found in the Xbox Media Player forums, but neither the blind XBMP button combinations nor the Enigmah Video Mode Selector disc worked. It looks like I'm going to have to find someone locally with a PAL TV to hook this thing up to. Either that or keep the new one and sell a PAL v1.0 Xbox on ebay.

As for the laptop, THANK GOD FOR ARS TECHNICA! After seraching their forums I came up with not only the exact solution that would fix my problem, but only used the WinXP boot disc. This saved me a LOT of work because I hadn't backed up recently and I had all of Matt's (mostly)finished DVD there.

Oh, and I can't say why because this is public and we're being secretive about it, but Chris is a genious. For future reference spies are cool.