Edit: Hmmm. This entry seems to be causing problems and simply not appearing. Apparently some over-sensitive people found it way too much information as well so it's probably better it's changed.

Suffice it to say that I appear to have yet more bugs going round my house.

"Ewww Amelie, you should wash more" ... er, no actually. These bugs are drawn to warmth and carbon dioxide and live in the walls. I couldn't clean my house/self any more if I tried, I'm a serious clean freak which is why having these things around my house is seriously annoying me.

Blah :(

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.

Next time you freak out about there being dust in your computer, do not attempt to take it apart because you will break it.

...this stems from me being a complete clean freak as far as my laptop is concerned. I take it apart regularly and clean the fan and all the other random bits and pieces. The only part I'd never done was the heatsink (the bit that cools the processor). In removing the heatsink, I managed to tear out the processor (which was not supposed to come out - it was locked into the motherboard with a switch that was accessible after the heatsink and cooling system was removed) because it was stuck to the heatsink with some heatsink paste (stuff meant to help cool everything down, not meant to stick).

Two hours later, I had a dead computer and a processor which would not go back into place because half of its pins were bent (due to aforementioned wrenching). I managed to eventually get them straightened out and separate the heatsink from the processor in order to put everything back together, but my poor laptop still wouldn't work :( I prodded it a bit and realised I'd put the fan back on upside down. Correcting this meant I had a working laptop once more.

Needless to say, I got laughed at by others who know far more about this sort of thing than I do. >.< ...I believe I have learned my lesson.

(Though having said that, I was very slightly hoping my computer had permanently died so I could get a new one :P )