ok.

so, i'm going to want to get the documents updated at noise trade & bandcamp, now. we'll clean this mess up after i'm done.

i'm thinking about it though, and how do i get out of this mess, more generally?

in the mid to late 00s, i only connected to the internet over winlited xp images that had been reverse engineered to rip most of the networking functionality out of them. then my life changed drastically in mid-2011. i've been connecting with laptops for several years now, under the assumption that what's on the machine doesn't matter much, and i can always reinstall on short notice. but, with all of the screens burning out (under shady conditions.), i've had to reanalyze this - it hasn't been easy to reinstall, and i'm wasting large amounts of time on troubleshooting.

how do i get out of this?

i've tried installing to the laptop drive on the pc and then plugging it into the laptop, but it doesn't seem to want to pick up the chipset drivers. rather, i need to copy over the files from the existing install, which is messy and corrupted from the drivers from both systems. 

it's been a while since i tried to boot from the dvd, but my memory is that the drive was damaged and, to the extent that it worked at all, it was very slow. i don't remember the right key combination to get it to boot from disc, but i could probably figure that out.

even if i could get that to work, it would mean spending days setting the system back up, and who knows for how long.

what i'm wondering is if it's time to build a custom windows 7 image, if i even can. i don't think that anything like winlite ever came out for windows 7. but, if it did, i could get all of the patches in to it, then rip the core of it out, then copy over an actual fresh install whenever i get attacked. 

i'm also toying with the idea of either installing xp in a virtual machine in linux or just putting xp on there, straight up. if my primary interest right now is security, though, then there are problems with both approaches.

i want to struggle through the rest of the rebuild for jan/2014, first, and i may find myself spending large amounts of time offline as i do it. but, i'm going to have to sit and figure this out, once that's done. this isn't sustainable...