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So, it's not exactly a Devonshire city, but I have a minor Devon-related quandry on my hands. Keeping it simple, my extremely non-technical sister moved to Exeter fairly recently, taking her Ubuntu-ified PC which her... and the hard drive appears to have popped its clogs (a half-hour phone call revealed - at long last - that the PC is attempting to network boot). Being 300 miles away means I can't really do much about that, and performing a drive swap + OS reinstall is well beyond my sister's capabilities. So I'm wondering if there's any Exeter-based facilities (and I use that term very broadly ;) ) that might help to sort the situation out - confirm the diagnosis, then swap components and perform a reinstall as necessary. Adding an 802.11g PCI card at the same time would also be muchos helpful. I have spare drives here that I could post down, they're just no good without a linuxy person such as myself :D. A reinstall would be pretty simple to do - it's all very standard hardware with the exception of a 3G wireless internet USB device, which has very good linux drivers and a frontend which just happens to depend on specific Python versions. nVidia graphics card if I recall correctly. Failing that, an analogue to York's Comprec (www.comprec.org.uk) where she could just grab a 'new' (haha) PC with linux preinstalled, and possibly get rid of the old one, would be a godsend. The other alternative is me buying her a PC off eBay (gak) or similar with windows preinstalled and getting it shipped to her - I don't really want to do that if possible. Speed is a concern as she uses the PC for working on t'internet (moderator for Cartoon Network) so needs to be up and running again pretty fast. Oh, and Flash has to work perfectly :D. She's working on a budget of around £50, and unlimited eternal gratitude, so please feel free to hit me with suggestions :) /Nick -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html