Bother

"Bother!" said Virge. "This motherboard change-over is taking too much time. The system works sufficiently well to play Warcraft3, but it still crashes on any net access and on Cakewalk. I've downloaded driver updates. I've disabled and removed potentially annoying devices. I even found a program to remove DirectX 9, just to check if that was causing the problems."

"You've still got Win98 in there. That's got to be the problem. It's an old faltering fossil - not the only one around here," said the nagging voice inside his head.

"But I don't want to back everything up and install a new OS and then reinstall everything. I've got better things to do with my time."

"If the stuff was important you should already have it backed up. Besides, you're wasting your time anyway, Virge, with all this searching and re-booting. While the upgraded Mobo won't talk to the net you only have one net PC - and that gets tied up by the kids. Bite the bullet, bozo. Wait another year and nothing will run under Win98 anyway."

"But that's like admitting defeat. How can I back away from a technical problem. There must be an answer."

"Aha! Now we see the root of your problem. You'll spend hours, days, weeks on the problem just for the sake of your precious engineering pride. Let it go, you gimpy geriatric geek. Get a life!"