Some up and down

Yesterday I worked for a 2nd time on a lady's Sony Vaio with XP Home
edition on it. What I found out last week is that her hard drive had
developed some bad sectors preventing XP from successfully booting up,
even in Safe Mode. So I diagnosed the problem as corrupt system files,
but after working with it for a while, I also determined that the bad
sectors corrupted some of the drivers needed to make it work. This was
due to having to wait a long time for the re-install of XP Home which
wasn't appearing to go very far.

So I decided to install a 2nd copy. This is when I found yet another
Stupid Install of XP. The hard drive is an 80 Gig Seagate. I guess the
bad sectors developed due to an incorrect shutdown or something, plus
this system sits on shag carpeting. That's a prime target for static
discharge. One of my recommendations was to get it up off the carpet.

Anywho, in the process of installing the 2nd copy, I found that C:
partition was only 16 Gigs, and D: Partition was 60 Gigs!! WHO THE HELL
DOES THAT? Did this come this way from the Sony Vaio dealer? Who was
that? So I installed the 2nd copy on the D: partition. But the problem I
face after that is finding the right drivers for this system. The model
number on the front says one thing, but when I try to get the drivers
off Sony's support website, the ones for Video say they're not made for
this system. The Yamaha sound card driver works just fine though!

So my job now is to find out what this system's got for hardware and try
to find the right drivers. After which, I would like to wipe the hard
drive and erase the partition table and make it a straight 80 Gig drive
once I have that figured out.

The down part is one guy's laptop I worked on earlier this year figuring
out a problem he was having with video files. The inverter circuit for
the backlight failed, and I found a replacement part on a website for a
mere $24. I even sent an email with a link to the precise page for the
part, so all that would need to be done is click on Put in Cart, and
proceed to checkout.

Instead I feel let down in that he couldn't do that for some reason and
instead ended up going to someone else and paying more for the part plus
the service to put it in. I feel I probably should give him what he paid
me for looking at the laptop earlier this year.