Nothing but trouble

When i booted my comp on Thursday (a national holiday), nothing happened. It kept shutting down and re-booting. So I got my XP recovery CD and formatted the hard drive. Thus, all my data was deleted. Yippie. I don’t even want to think about what exactly was all lost. All my pics, wallpapers, desktop themes, browser bookmarks, fonts, games etc. Anyway, C:\ was formatted, the installation files were loaded, installation started. Then, when it said “26 minutes left”, I was asked to insert the XP CD. And the searching began, cos I didn’t have it in the box where all my other CDs were stored. I searched a number of rooms in the house and even drove to my sister’s place cos I had lent her the CD a while ago when she had a problem with her laptop. Of course, I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I clicked cancel instead of ok. The installation continued, and some kind of Windows is on my comp, but there’s not much there. No IE, no WMP and lots of other stuff is probably missing, too. When I wanted to start the Drivers & Utilities CD I also have to fix things, it said runtime error. Great. I thought the solution was to get an XP CD from someone. On Friday evening, my sister’s best friend, who lives round the corner, was home and had such a CD and I borrowed it from her. I tried several things, but never got further than I had got before cos even when I had put the CD in the DVD drive (my CD-RW drive is broken) and clicked OK, nothing happened, i.e. the necessary files simply couldn’t be installed or copied from the CD for some reason. I thought maybe the comp was looking for them in the wrong drive (it said D:\i386 as the location), but even when I changed that to E:\, nothing happened. Argh. I really don’t know what to do and am seriously considering getting Linux, if it’s available for free. I am so annoyed by all this crap. I have 4 days off from work, but can’t enjoy them at all. I just want to scream and shout all day. Stupid computers. Oh, BTW, I have no idea why my comp wouldn’t start properly in the first place. I’ve been having problems for a while, such as the computer re-booting when I wanted to connect to the internet (via my slow dial-up modem), but I had gotten used to that. I don’t think it was a virus cos my anti-virus software downloads the latest updates whenever I go online. I’m so lost.

Sorry if all of the above wasn't very interesting. I just needed to write it down, I guess. And I wanted to let you know that you probably won't here from me for a while. At the moment, I'm online via my old laptop. My mood couldn't be worse and there's not even a new ep of Veronica Mars on today because of some stupid sports event. Also, the weather sucks. It's cold and rainy and windy. GRRRRRRRRRRR