Okay so having got my PC working I foolishly did two things. One I tried to resize my disk partitions (hey in 2003 10Gb was all I would ever need for the C: partition), two I tried to re-install Windows XP after a house move. I got XP to install but couldn’t find my license key. So I decided to bite the bullet and buy Vista Home Premium instead and just get everything done in one go.

So Vista arrived this morning and this evening I stuck in the USB external DVD drive I use and… heard the DVD drive grind uselessly on the DVD for a while. Quickly chucking in a normal DVD I confirmed that that wasn’t a problem and headed over to Microsoft support. In the advice about unrecognised media it mentioned checking Firmware revisions on DVD players. Well, so be it, after all the drive is a couple of years old now, and so onto the Samsung website. They have a little updater program, that only runs on Windows… so now I am going to have to take my external DVD drive into work along with the Vista disk. Try the firmware upgrade with the disk and order CD copies of Vista if it still doesn’t work. Why should I do the latter? Well because Microsoft’s site for ordering alternative media doesn’t work with Firefox.

How come some many tech problems can only be solved by having a working platform in the first place?