Ok. About those two PCs.
Fixed one of them. XP did not boot at all. Booted PC from XP Live CD and found a damaged partition (and a crappy loud Maxtor HDD) that I could not access.
Ran Paragon PM 10.0 Live CD and repaired the partition. XP booted up and showed a “Checking Drive C” screen. Then booted to desktop and worked as normal.
This damaged parition may be a sign of failing HDD. I did not scan the HDD for bad sectors (due to lack of time).
There was Kaspersky AV installed but it had no valid lic. key so it did not work. I ordered a renewal for Kaspersky and also bought a 320GB mobile hard disk.
Second PC did not have any problems except that it was slow and had some crappy half-XP half-Vista skin installed. That one had just 256MB RAM (the first one had 51MB2 RAM).
Also, some good news and some bad news:
The Good:
Fixed a PC and got paid.
Bought additional 320GB of external space
The Bad (or not?):
Found an update for my virtual machine software, VMWare WS 7.0 Tech Beta. It had many new features, including an updated 3D with SM 3.0 support.
But the damn installer doesn’t want to work at all.
Edit: OK, got it to work somehow, will post back all is done.
The strange thing is that that “private beta” is available for download if you know where to look at: Here’s the link (registration needed)