You will need the following tools:

1. A week-old laptop, present from relatives preferred
2. Um...that's it

Note: no brain is required for the purposes of this tutorial.

Method:

1. Make sure you have finally finished customising and configuring your new laptop after having spent the last week getting lost in its preinstalled Windows Vista.
2. Decide to be geeky and install a second Operating System. You have done this before (it was a fluke, but no one has to know that) so this should be no problem at all.
3. Run through installation of said Operating System, making sure not to miss the part about partitioning the hard drive.
4. Yay, new OS installed. Reboot! Windows will then say it cannot run.
5. Realise you have completely messed up the partitioning and therefore have chopped Windows in half. Rectify this mistake by simply deleting and reformatting the partitions of the hard drive that you want back.
6. Reboot! Your computer should now display a lovely error message saying the boot partition is corrupted or similar. Congratulations, you have now completed this tutorial.

Oh yes, that was me yesterday. I've had this laptop a week and I've broken it already. Luckily I was able to repair most of the damage without reinstalling everything (yay rescue disk) but some things (e.g. wireless) are still broken :( Blah.

I appear to have had a birthday today... And with it, came a brand new shiny laptop! :D My four-year-old one was really starting to give up (especially the screen) so I thought it was about time it was replaced. I now have a Toshiba Equium Dual Core 1.73GHz/2GB RAM/120GB HDD/15.4" widescreen/Windows Vista laptop. Its brightness makes me realise just how bad the screen from the last one was getting... I had both laptops on next to each other and it seemed like the old one wasn't even on.

I also got a digital photoframe from the boyfriend :D It's brilliant! You put in a memory card and it'll do a slideshow of the pictures. It'll also do alarm clocks and stuff but I'm not really interested in that... The fact that I can have a picture frame that changes its photo whenever I want (it even has a remote control for that XD ) is enough to keep me entertained for ages :D :D :D

Anyway, back to the laptop... Ooooooooh it's nice. The fact that it goes higher than 1024×768 is great - my photos fit on my screen now :P But like I said, it has Windows Vista on it. URGH. If I had an XP disk I'd install that on there - Vista is really quite rubbish. Ok so it looks shiny, but I can't find anything in it and most stuff that was simple in XP and prior is stupidly difficult in Vista. GAH. The fact that I can't change the colour of the taskbar is very annoying, as is the lack of themes and customisations. I don't want a black taskbar, I don't want weird blue-ish/transparent windows with huge borders, I want my own theme kthx. >:(

Apart from that, it's wonderful and I love it lots. <3<3<3<3 :D

How is it already nearly September?! I have no idea where time seems to be hiding these days, it seems I wake up Monday morning and then it's suddenly Sunday night and I'm doing the whole thing over again. Where are those days when I had too much time and too little to do? I miss them :( And while I'm at it, where on earth is summer this year? England doesn't seem to be having one. It's cold and raining and boring just like it always is, yuk.

Thank you for all the Ruby tips, by the way (and yes Rachael, I did read yours before I snipped them out - Akismet wouldn't have any of it otherwise). I think I'm getting the hang of it, but obviously I'm nowhere near as good with that as I am with PHP (and I'm not hugely great at that either - the finer points still escape me) but I think I'll get there eventually.

Um, yeah. That's about all I can think of to write. I'm so terribly boring. When I think of something less boring to do/write about then I will post again, ooh.