So I have been having a bitch of a time with my PC for the past 4 or 5 months. Can't get videos to play without skipping. have tried everything, and the weird thing is that it started spontaneously. I have now swapped out a hard drive, a video card, reinstalled windows 3 times (once repair, twice cleanly). The first time I did it cleanly I did it overtop of the previous installation. I figured that maybe, that was the problem and some driver somewhere was getting re-used. Last night I tried it by removing all hints of windows from the hard drive! I downloaded the latest Ubuntu (10.04) cd (which by default is a live-cd) and then quickly copied all the windows files to d:\backup, rebooted and reinstalled windows fresh. Same problem! Still can't watch hardware accelerated videos without jerkyness!

Well instead of going through the tedious task of reinstalling my life onto the PC again (Chrome, Firefox, Visual Studio, Office, getting TVersity to stream MKV's properly, getting iTunes happy again with my iphone, and installing the 30 or so little utilities I can't live without) I thought, well why not just copy all the files back? I booted back into the Ubuntu Linux, deleted the newly installed copy of Windows and then copied my files back from D:\backup.

I booted up and was hoping I could do some kind of Windows repair and mess around a little but get most of the things working again. Amazingly enough, I didn't have to. It just booted into my old version of Windows! Everything was happy! I can't believe that actually worked. Now, all I have to do is buy a new PC to fix my freaking video problem! Technology both rocks and sucks at the same time!.