Ugh, this is all so familiar.
Just this morning, I finished up a job for a dentist. It seems his old digital x-ray system was failing. Now, he'd gotten a new system and was using it for all new x-rays, but the old ones were still in the old system. The old system that was running an ancient version of the software, on XP, with a failing power supply, fan, hard drive, and who knows what else, covered in dust and that lovely white powder you find in all dental office computing gear, that powder you strongly suspect to be bits of ground-up teeth.
Anyway, after moving the drive to newer hardware and faking out the XP activation (apparently MS won't activate it any more) I finally got it to boot long enough to export the data. (Yes, just moving the drive was risky. But there was something wrong with it, I couldn't get it to image to a newer drive. I did manage to sort of get a backup before I dropped it in another machine.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
