I don't need help for this one. Just sympathy. Yesterday, my wife calls me and says her three-year-old Dell laptop is booting up directly into a blue screen of death and complaining about not finding NTLDR. Uggh. I say "just leave it off and I'll fix it later." I was working on it basically from 3pm through 1am with a break for dinner.

- It never blue-screened for me. When it booted, it said it had trouble booting before and offered me "safe mode."

- Unlike last year, when her hard drive died and I was able to extract the image and put it onto a new drive, this time I decided to go for a complete reinstall.

- Since I didn't trust Windows to write its files out to a USB hard drive, I went with a Ubuntu LiveCD. Nice stuff! It recognized and automounted both the internal and external USB disk, using FUSE and whatnot. Completely painless. It even recognized my wireless card. Ubuntu rocks.

- I used a volume license key and an XP Pro SP2 disk, pre-patched and ready to go, borrowed from the IT staff at work (my wife and I share our employer, who has a site license). Getting XP reinstalled wasn't too hard, but the damn auto-updater didn't quite work right, requiring me to follow some dodgy advice that completely solved the problem.

- Then I had to install all the damn drivers. Dell helpfully lets you punch in your "service tag" and gets you straight to all the files you need, with the exception of their lame DVD playing software. I'm now using VLC for that.

- I switched back to Ubuntu for restoring the files. It seems both faster and less error prone than doing it with Windows.

- The I reinstalled all the applications. Some stuff, like Firefox extensions and Thunderbird mail, all just magically kept working and saw all their state exactly how I left it. iTunes got confused and I had to have it rescan the files. Picasa never found its old state, but it's all soft state anyway. It rescanned the pictures and metadata and came out fine.

To the extent that there's a moral to this story, it's that Ubuntu LiveCDs are a life saver. Out of the box, it just magically worked. Windows XP... anything but.