Well, whatever it was, the computer died this afternoon. Permanent blue screen of death.

Message: "Unmountable boot volume" lead me to my office computer to learn that I could possibly boot it from the XP disk since the boot.ini was no doubt damaged. Didn't work. So I did some more searching and found the Microsoft file to download to then burn to six floppies to boot then do a reinstall. First one went in fine, but the second floppy brought the message that it couldn't load file \ntkrnlmp.exe and gave error code 7.

Back to the computer. \ntkrnlmp.exe in that usage won't load if there is a bad RAM card or if the BIOS is messed up. I took out a RAM card, got the same message, put it back and removed the other. Same message. Must be the BIOS--what are the odds that both RAM cards would die simultaneously?

Dell has a BIOS update (came out in Feb of this year) at their web site for this particular computer, but I have this computer set for automatic updates when Dell lets us know they're there, so I think it is probably already in there.

I've hacked up my knuckles enough on this today. The kids' dad is going to pick up the CPU and the disks with it and see if a techie friend of his at work can figure it out. I wonder if buying a cheap hard drive, putting it in and reinstalling the computer on it then putting the old drive in in a slave position might just take care of it and not lose their data. $50 would take care of it, but his friend probably can tinker and do more testing before we get to that point.

Bleh. It's only Thursday. What as week it has been.

SRS