Rebuilding machines

This past month has been the month of installing stuff. My wife's hard drive crashed. I managed to resuscitate it enough to pull most data off, then dropped a new drive in. I got a new laptop (an insurance replacement for the laptop that got stolen from our house) and had to set that up. Then serious issues with my primary machine. I am now freelancing. None of this is billable time of course.

My primary machine is a seven (!) year old Dell. It has served me well. Lately I have had difficulty installing software, especially some Windows Updates and Visual Studio 2008. The errors have never been very helpful but in the event logs I could see recurring errors with the Cryptographic Provider Service not being able to start. The error is simply "error: 193".

It seems that people had big issues with the Cryptographic Service in 2003-2004 associated with some service packs, but none of the solutions from that time (deleting corrupt databases so it would rebuild them, checking your "Trusted Root Certification Authorities") made a bit of difference.

In the end I reinstalled the Windows XP Pro, then all my usual applications, then various service packs (SP3 can't be installed without a prior SP; SP1 is not available; SP2 can be installed without anything prior), drivers from Dell etc.

This past month has blown out our data caps several times. New Zealand ISPs charge by data throughput. We have a 5Gb per month allocation. This past month we used 14Gb. Of course, downloading a 1.7Gb IDE for iPhone development didn't help.