So I would've had the eMachines Box back up and going by now, but unfortunately, my stupid ass bought a SATA drive! It had an IDE one in there. I returned that this morning at work and rush-ordered an equivalently-sized IDE drive from eBay yesterday. It should be here by the 21st. Hopefully that's the end of it.

That said, there are some new things to note in the saga:

First and foremost, the old drive does still kinda work! Work has some IDE-to-USB cables on the tech bench, and plugging it into that, I was able to get it going again...occasionally. The drive is definitely toast, but it was genuinely shocking seeing all my stuff again. I was trying to copy whatever I thought I lost off of it, but the tech bench PC needs to take ownership of my user folder, which is filled with especially MSN Messenger garbage and other temp files and, let's be real, it takes forever to read as it is. There was nothing that important on the drive and I'm okay with the loss.

Second, I did blow out the fucking carpet of dust and grime that was in the box finally! Got a two-pack of compressed air and went to town on it on the deck. Now it looks much better in there and I'm less afraid to have it on and, more importantly, open it and handle what's inside. Thankfully, it still works as well as it did before I opened it too—I was worried taking out and fondling the RAM and whatnot would've caused it to stop working, because this is all very new territory for me, but nope, we're good.

There's actually a good amount of upgrade potential in this thing—it can handle 2GB of RAM and any equivalent Pentium 4 (currently it's a Celeron D in there), and it has a PCI-e x16 slot for a graphics card, a PCI slot for a sound card, and the hard drive cage can actually screw in and support two hard drives. I'd like to get a second one with Vista loaded on there when the specs support it a little better. There's enough space in the removable drive cage (where the DVD-R drive is mounted) for two drives, but there's a stupid metal shield where you could pop the second drive in, and the screw holes on the bottom half of the cage are just dimples, not real holes. I wonder if I could get someone to drill me proper mounting holes and I could potentially put a floppy drive in here too? That's...vaguely unnecessary, but super cool! And that's really this entire machine, isn't it?

So yeah, I'm still floating uncomfortable and waiting on a drive, but the computer is doing fine and we're prepped whenever it shows up. God, am I prepped.