Just like yesterday, I got up, had a shower, got ready, checked my spam, left, about 7.45am.

I went to work, and worked all day, I stopped for a few minutes to get some lunch, and kept working.

I get so engrossed in the stuff, I don't want to stop.

I managed to get all the records out of the database, to do with the stuff on the optical disks I have to export.

The windows server they've got to replace the system turned up this morning, so it was setup in the afternoon.

I went up to the "warehouse", which is just a room where they dump all new and old equipment.

The server was in there, I installed the software on it, but it kept saying that I didn't have license permission to do things.

I rebooted, but that made no difference. I thought perhaps the license key was case sensitive, so I changed it, but that made no difference, I uninstalled and reinstalled the software, still no good. This is crap.

I went and saw the project manager, told him about the issues. We called up the company, the woman was really rude, when we explained the situation "no, that's not the correct key for that software, you have to use a different key" it turned out they hadn't even given us the correct key.

There are 3 cds, and 3 keys, and the keys we were given were listed with the name of the product they are for, and the 3 cds had the corresponding names of the product printed on them, so logically, you would think that there was a key per cd.

Apparently not, there are 2 products on one cd, and they hadn't given us the key for the other product.

We asked for the correct key, and she asked if we were at the machine, we were not "well you have to be at the machine so I can tell you how to change it", "no, you can just tell me the number, and I will use the license manager and enter it myself.". She then proceeded to tell us the stupidly long product key.

We got off the phone, had a meeting for a short while, I went back and entered the code, it was fine.

I went back down, and continued working on an export script.

My mate rang me, he'd got the new parts for the PC we were working on on Saturday, some guy had turned up, and had put the board in to the case, but because the screw holes in the board didn't quite line up with the spacers screwed into the mobo tray, he hadn't bothered to put any screws in it. Hmm. great, so I get to do the whole thing again. My mate had apprently almost finished "setting it up", and just needed me to restore some of the backed up data.

I gave up on the export script, and left, I'll just miss a day without running an export, since there are things I need to test.

I left, and I headed up to my mate's place, to finish the PC off.

I looked at the board install.. the guy who board the board in expected that the stupid little plastic clip spacers and the cards would hold the board in place, instead of screws. That's crap.

I started by ripping that all out, and working out why the board was about 1mm out of place.

It seems that the cutout in the back of the case, where you put the plate around the ports on the mobo was the issue. I tried bending it, to see if it would allow me to move it slightly, and get the board close enough that the screws would fit, but it didn't work, it was a couple of mm out of place.

I asked if my mate had any tin snips, but he said he didn't, but did have a hacksaw. Ugh, that will have to do.

He dug through the toolbox to find it, and found some rusty old tins snips he said din't work.

I tired using them, he's right, they don't work.

I looked, and saw that the blades were close, but it was possible to make them come apart, that must be the problem. I tightened the nut on the side, oops, a bit far, now I can hardly get them open, but I was able to successfully trim the bottom off the plate.

I put it back in the case, and now the motherboard lined up, so I screwed it in.

It was a crappy motherboard, SiS something, and my mate had tried to put their shitty old video card on it, but it didn't work (yeah, AGP voltage issues) (oh, hang on, I think they only had a PCI card in their old machine).

I asked him why he didn't get one with onboard video (which is crap, but not as bad as the card he had in there), and he said because it was cheaper, and he wanted to use their video card. (Argh! why?! I told him on Saturday when we were bringing the PC back with us, that there is no point upgrading a machine and putting a shit video card in it!).

I continued working on the machine anyway.

I attached the disk I'd used to back up the machine, and copied the email, address book, and favourites across again.

It now seemed like it was done.

Something seemed a bit suss. I asked if my mate had reinstalled windows (because the mobo had been changed), "no, it's the install you did the other day". ARGH! the crappy install I attempted on Saturday, which failed spectactularly, because the hardware was screwed! This has been a complete waste of time.

Apparently his idea of "setting it up" was installing all the shitty applications I don't even bother doing.

We had dinner, some sort of fish bean curd thing with rice.

I went back to the machine, and removed the backup hard disk, and attached the cdrw drive, to finish the PC off.

Uhh.. the POST screen of the BIOS is scrolling off the screen listing "Base Peripheral Devices" or something, what's all this garbage?

Winblows wouldn't boot either, it hung halfway through.

I reset the machine, and now, it wouldn't even boot properly, it would come up with some details, but then instead of counting the memory and continuing on to try to boot, it would just reboot itself. I let it do this about 5 times, before I turned it off.

I unplugged the cdrw drive again, but it made no difference. I went to reset the CMOS data, in case it had got scrambled.. no CMOS clear pins on the motherboard. This is a really shit board.

I had to unplug the machine, remove the battery from the mobo, wait a minute, and then put it all back together.

The machine reset, and it worked fine. I booted winblows, shut it down again, and did this about 3 times to test it was fine.

I put the cdrw drive on again. The CMOS data got corrupted again, all the "Base Peripheral" nonsense came back, and the winblows boot hung, or the BIOS would get caught in a reboot cycle.

I reset the CMOS again, back working fine. Either there is something wrong with this cdrw drive, or the mobo.

My mate said that he didn't have a personal number for the guy at the wholesaler that sold him the board. Well of course not, as if he's going to go giving out his home number to every clown that buys something off him, so he can have them calling him at 9pm complaining something doesn't work, that he couldn't give a shit about.

My mate had another machine there at the time, with almost exactly the same cdrw drive in it, so I decided to test what was going on. I removed the drive from the other pc, connected it to this one, and it worked fine. It must be the cdrw drive then.

I removed the cdrw drive that was causing issues, replaced it with the drive from the other pc, and put the drive from this pc in the other one.

OK, the machine is done, it can go back to them now, I'm sick of it. I don't care that the install of windows is screwed.

I left, and came home.

I checked my email, and went to bed about 11.45pm.