Randy called and wanted me to come over and help him with his computer. I said I'd come over after I finished the kitchen and put in applications. My mom's in the "finding job" mode. First it was Cybersitter and that's like all she thought about. Then it switched to computer mode because I needed to install Windows XP for the family and every time I wasn't doing something, my parents would ask me how the computer was going. Right as I finish that, my mom is suddenly asking me why I'm not going and putting in applications at places. I finished the Monaco application and was going to turn it in, but it was after 5 and they had already gone home. I called Randy and told him to meet me at the Gateway Mall since I didn't remember how to get to his house. I met him there and followed him to his house. I brought along DBZ movies 9 and 10. #9 has Bojack for the bad guy. He's alright, but not nearly as cool as a lot of others on that show. Movie 10 and 11 are probably my least favorite out of the 13. Sure, they have my favorite bad guy, Broli, in them, but he gets beat by young Trunks and Goten. I mean, c'mon! He hardly even tries in those movies. He's nothing like the crazy, merciless guy he was in movie 8. Oh well. He watched those and I worked on his messed-up computer.

Yeah, messed-up is right. It had Windows XP on it that wouldn't start. I decided to reinstall Windows and it would be okay to wipe the drive clean because he has everything backed up. I tried booting from the Windows XP CD so I could do that easily. It wouldn't boot from the CD. He said he had a Windows 98 boot disk, so I popped that in. His computer wouldn't even turn the floppy disk drive light on. After messing around with it in CMOS, I proposed that we try a different floppy disk drive. I unplugged his and plugged in another one. That one worked fine. I told him to throw away the one he had in there.

So, once I got it to a command prompt, I tried running the setup program off the Windows XP CD. It said it can't run in DOS. Great. That meant we'd have to run it from Windows 98, meaning we'd have to format the drive using FAT32 instead of the superior NTFS because Windows 98 can't read NTFS. I could only hope that the Windows XP setup program that ran from Windows 98 would let you reformat the drive in NTFS, otherwise Randy would have to settle for Windows XP in FAT32. It's not a huge difference. NTFS just doesn't need to be defragmented because it doesn't get fragmented. You also don't need to run Scandisk on it very much. I started the Windows 98 install process, but it kept having errors. Since there was nothing on the hard drive, it could only mean that the hard drive itself was going bad. Yay. It was only a 15 GB one, and Randy had a new 40 GB hard drive that he said wouldn't work on it. I swapped the drives and sure enough, it wouldn't even recognize that the hard drive was in there. After switching the jumpers around on it, I determined that his BIOS was too old to support a hard drive that big and he'd have to check the manufacturer's website for a BIOS upgrade. He doesn't have a computer with internet access there right now, so I said I'd go home and check for one. Sure enough, there are a number of upgrades and some say that it will let that motherboard use bigger drives, and one says that it fixes a bug that didn't let the computer boot from a Windows 2000 or Windows XP CD. Heh, that explains it. He gave me the photo of my Halloween costume. Yah, now I can scan it!

Before I got home, I stopped into Wal-Mart to see Brent since he's been wondering when I'm going to come see him. We talked for a while and he said that he already got in trouble from Sherene. He's taken over my old shift and I think he likes it. He said whenever he asks Sherene why I was fired and tries to get me back, she just says that I was stealing company time by buying pizza on the clock. He keeps telling her that it's not that big a deal that I did that. But he said that what did me in was 2 people who were talking to Sherene about me. Ruby and Carly. Yeah, Carly's still obviously actively against me. I mean, jeez. I liked her, I hung out with her, I was too clingy and she ended the friendship because of the stress. I can understand that, but she can leave it at that. I hardly ever ran into her at work. I guess she just really hates me. I don't understand her at all. I saw Damaris for the first time since I was fired. She didn't even know I was fired! She wanted her book back and didn't say much else. I was walking with Brent and he went to go talk to Angela. She was happy to see me and asked how I was doing. Her dad works at Symantec where I'm trying to get a job. She went on her break and I would have went with her, but she was going to spend it putting lotion on her new tattoo on her back in the bathroom. Then I told Brent "bye" and went home.