Compy issues

The last few weeks have been pretty rough from a computer stand point. A little while back my computer just died, I tried a restart and got nothing, no POST beep or beep error codes. Nothing. Awesome. A little diagnosis later and I determine that the motherboard had died. Joy. In an age of rapidly progressing hardware, this pretty much meant I had to replace the "holy trinity" of computer parts: motherboard, CPU and RAM. Just to pile onto the fun, my perfectly good video card had to be replaced as well, since the AGP slot is basically extinct. A quick trip to newegg.com and a couple days of going stir-crazy, my computer is rebuilt.

I sit down in my chair, fire up the compy and... Windows won't start. @!#$ Not in safe mode, not in any mode. In all honesty, that's not a huge surprise considering I just replace most of the innards. I try to repair the installation, nada. *sigh* I break out my XP disks and resign myself to doing a complete reinstall... time passes... Finally, XP is installed, I go to activate it... "you have exceeded the number of times you can activate XP using this key"... grr... So I call customer support, go through their convoluted process to get my version of XP activated and finally have a fully function computer again. (Side note: I wonder what's going to happen when support for XP officially ends? Am I going to be able to activate my legit copy of Windows when I need to?)

Suffice to say, I'm mostly back up and running normally. I'm in the processes of getting everything "lived in" again In the meantime, I'm a bit stuck in neutral.