Problems and copy protection

A little more on my problem.
The hard disk itself is fine. The motherboard is toast. The logical solution is to replace the motherboard and go to work.

Unfortunately that runs square into Microsoft's copy protection fetish. If you replace the motherboard the operating system thinks its been loaded on a new computer, so it won't work until it is reauthorized by Microsoft. To get it reauthorized you need the OS serial number -- which I didn't get with the computer (remanufactured). So I'm stuck.

This has been very frustrating.

PROBLEMS

Thanks to computer problems posting "The Wizardry Recapitalized" has been serious disrupted.

In the last month I've had not one but two computers turn into expensive doorstops and discovered that my backups weren't recoverable. Wiz 6 is safely sitting on a hard drive on a dead computer.

It's going to take a fairly elaborate recovery process to get the novel back -- essentially I've got to take the hard drive out of the system, connect it temporarily to another box and download the data. One complication is that the drive is IDE and the box is probably going to use SATA. The other complication is Windows copy protection.

My tech says he can do it, but it's going to take time. In part because all this has put me seriously behind on my paying work and I'm just getting caught up on that.

Oh well. If it was easy everyone would do it.

--RC