I got past the license key part of the installation, but I'm still arguing with it.

First, I have to point out how … odd the recovery was. It came on two CDs which appear to be CD-Rs that had the labels silkscreened on by hand. It booted into Windows98 command prompt mode and loaded a DOS CD driver in order to … I'm not totally sure; format the hard drive, maybe? Then it rebooted itself and proceeded to copy the XP installation to C:\i386 by extracting what must have been fifty ZIP files. Then it rebooted again into the normal Windows XP installation which they had somehow scripted. Then it booted into XP where it automatically installed a bunch of IBM-specific software. It rebooted several times while doing this. Finally it ran sysprep on itself and rebooted again, where I finally got to interact with the OS. This all took about 45 minutes.

Then once it was installed, it was XP SP0. No service pack at all. You know how XP service packs are supposed to be all-inclusive, so that you don't need to install intermediate service packs? Like Microsoft says: "SP3 includes all previously released Windows XP updates, including security updates, hotfixes, and select out-of-band releases." Of course, it then goes on to say "To install SP3, either Windows XP Service Pack 1a (SP1a) or Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) must already be installed." I don't think the folks over at Microsoft really understand that "all previously released" means. So I got to install SP2, then SP3. Each one of those took probably half an hour.

Then onto the post-SP3 updates, of which there are dozens. Those took another hour or so. (Remember that this is a P3M with 128MB of RAM. If I had a PC133 SODIMM lying around, I'd give it to her.)

Then I realized that the recovery CD had formatted the new 150GB hard drive into a 30GB partition. So I had to go download a filesystem resizer. (EASEUS is free for home use and works pretty well, BTW.)

All of this, BTW, was while its ethernet was hooked up to my MacBook because the WiFi card doesn't support anything beyond WEP. Not that I'm sure that's relevant anyway; I can't even get it to see the half dozen networks available around here. I think it's broken somehow. Haven't figured that one out yet. I did manage to completely screw up the OS while trying to fix it, though, so I got to recover again. That was another three or four hours.

Internet Explorer occasionally forgets how to make network connections, which makes downloading stuff fun.

The IBM software update utility that came with the system no longer works, and the one that replaced it no longer works, either. And IBM/Lenovo gives you a matrix for the specific model, but there are enough variations of the model that it can be hard to figure out which hardware you have, what you need to download, and what is already installed. Add onto that that the downloads are named descriptive things like "7avu43ww.exe" and don't actually install anything, but merely extract themselves to such unique directories as "C:\DRIVERS\WIN", and getting updates is just a nightmare.

So I'm still arguing with it. And I haven't even gotten to restoring data yet.