if this mess with the virus goes on for a while, i'm going to find myself with some extra spending money, and i guess i'll have an opportunity to go down to a pawn shop (or maybe on ebay) and see if i can find a new system board as an access point.

i've basically decided that i shouldn't boot back into the laptop's hard drive until i'm able to do a fresh install. maybe i can parallel into the bios at some point, but if i can't reinstall then i can't use it.

i just want to stop wasting my time on this and get back to work. let's hope the new install on the 90s laptop is a stable enough workaround to let me do that for a bit.