Windows XP did a number on me.

What was going to be a long boring story involving googling, corrupted dlls and product protection is now just a poor excuse for having something to write: the disk is ok, but the OS is stuck half way through the setup routine, which fails to copy across the relevant dlls, which prevent it from installing. It takes around 45 mins to get to this stage, which seems to be a consequence of mswsock.dll or phlpapi.dll(?) being fscked. Catch 22. A minimal boot disk doesn't help, and finding a laptop that can take a second drive is beyond me given time constraints.

So, does anyone know of utilities I can use that fit into 250/300k or so that I can copy the the really important things one by one onto a diskette? (Four 1mb photos including a classic "is she stoned" self portrait). Um, not sure how I'll know which are the important photos as they're not individually named. NTFS, btw, in case it makes a difference. Blech. I'll probably just move on with the Debian GNU/Linux install.

Networking was the first to go, just as I was copying the last 2 gigs over wireless to the other laptop. Ironic no? A short while later even the help system wouldn't work.

While crying for help, I need an algorithm for quitting a Frontier install when system memory reaches a certain level. At the moment it quits after a certain number of hits.

On the way to the shops for groceries the other day it came over the wireless that there were whales just yards from the shore at Clifton beach no. 1. I dropped down there for a look and it made my day. Being dark and mainly submerged whales don't make for great pics, but you get one anyway (117k). Someone who'd been there before me told me it had been breaching earlier. Maybe next time.