Finally my big Desktop Machine gave up. What a horrible scenario. I have about 600GB of data in that machine (not all are images) and a ton of programs running on it. So far, I have always been able to save it, even when it mysteriously erased some dll files. This time the problem seems to be more severe. As soon as windows starts the monitor goes completely dark and I am unable to access the Windows boot menu.

I went in through the remote desktop and I have been trying to fix the problem without much luck. So I have started to clean up some external drives and backed up the main Hard Drive (about 300GB).

I found a pretty cool tool to build a CD containing all Windows updates, that I will be using before even connecting to the Internet (see picture, it is pulling all Windows updates).

So I spent all weekend with this instead of working on my pictures or website. I had my eye on a small IPAQ server on Ebay but I even missed to buy before the auction was over. I need to set it up to run a couple of cron scripts and automatically backup some databases across the internet (incuding the database for this website) as well as data feed creation and a bunch of other useful things.

Looks like my main machine is going to keep me busy for a while until I have everything up and running again.