The Household Technician

I was playing some badminton with Chuah, a housemate, when another housemate, CW, decided it was time for him to make full use of his Intel® 64-bit 3.0 Ghz processor. He had been downloading this torrent of Windows XP 64-bit for the past few weeks and it had finally completed. As the de facto technician I was asked to install it for him. Which I brilliantly did with my 1337 IT skills I give university no credit for. Extract multi-part RAR files - Check. Burn the .cue file with Nero - Check. Change BIOS boot priority - Check. Convert C:\ partition to NTFS file system - Check. Install Windows - wait it's asking for the CD-key. Hey CW, what's the CD key? What do you mean you don't know? Didn't it come with the file? Dunno-lah... Bring out old 32-bit Windows CD to try its CD-key - Failed! Search online for CD keys - Failed, and nearly got my computer infected with a virus in the process, bless you Norton. Randomly key in letters and numbers - Failed! Thank goodness it struck me that converting to NTFS doesn't actually format the drive. I managed to boot up his computer with an old Windows 98 startup disk and painstakingly look through his files with the ancient MS-DOS Edit command. And there it was! The key! Install Windows - Check. Reboot computer - Check. Set up Internet - Failed! Windows couldn't detect his network card, updating the NIC driver didn't work. Apparently, when CW had switched from his defunct Pentium III to his new computer he hadn't actually bought a new network card, but used his old one. In short, new 64-bit Pentium 4, obsolete 32-bit network card. So do you want to buy a new network card? No need lah...install back the old one Oh well. Went back to badminton, promptly hitting two shuttles onto the roof and ending the session prematurely.