The computer is back (in a fashion)

My past two- or three weeks of laptop troubles are over, finally. The parentals arrived in London yesterday and brought with me all the various installation disks I needed and my external hard drive. Last night I copied the files I really needed (eg, every picture I've taken since leaving home in April) to the external drive and set about reinstalling windows.

The repair function didn't want to work, because it said it repaired any problems but really ended up making it so that Windows was installed but wouldn't boot. It would get to "You need to activate Windows" or something and...stop. (Note: this was at about 11 PM). So I grunted in tired frustration, went ahead and reformatted the entire hard drive, and started from scratch.

My spare time the next few days will be occupied by reinstalling crap. But on the bright side? I have sound!