I got the phone call yesterday afteroon. "It's here.", my wife said, joy oozing over the phone. The final piece to her new computer had arrived. My task for the evening was set.

After getting the kids washed and into pajamas and properly positioned in front of Barney and Sigmund the Sea Monster, I began the construction process. James, Michele's cousin, was over for dinner and to do laundry. While my computer skillz are l33t, he makes me look like the old fogey of 32 that I am. He and I dived in. After a short break to read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish to the munchkins, I returned to work on the computer. By around 9:30 we had it POSTing and began the FDISK and FORMAT of the 30 gig hard drive.

We needed milk for the girls, so we logged on to kozmo.com fo easy delivery. We selected the milk, a DVD to watch while Windows installs and the latest Maxim (heh, X-Men chix). Then as we attempted to checkout kozmo bombed out and wouldn't accept our order. James and I ran to the supermarket to get the milk and picked up Chewy Chips Ahoy, but no damn Maxim! Thy had friggin Cosmopolitain but no Maxim. Sexism!

We returned to the land of 'searching for drivers' and feed the Windows monster all the drivers it asked for. Next was updating all the patches. Then I started with the essential apps: Electric Quilt 4, WinZip, Download Accelerator, Napster, iMesh, RioPort, DirectX, WinAmp, etc. Thank God for DSL.

Once the suite of MP3edness was installed, it was time to transfer 1.9 Gigs of MP3s off my computer to the new one. After beating our heads against Microsoft Networking, NetBeui, and Network Neighborhood for a while we finally could see my Music directory from her computer. At this time we we both a little tired and punchy. 45 minutes of file transfer later and it was done. My wife's new was ready for use. It was 2AM. 4 hours till the kids wake up. I went to sleep. James took his laundry and went home.

This morning I showed Michele the new computer and showed her the power button. Zoe called from the living room. She and Mira requested the 'Barney Halloween' to be played. By the time I returned to Michele, Napster was already running and she was downloading. Mission Accomplished.

The remaining big task is moving from Outlook Express on the Mac to the PC. I think we'll have to upload her stuff to an IMAP server and then d/l it to the PC. Beeg headache. Good thing James knows IMAP.