Everything is coming back together...
The external hard drive came in the mail. So I cleared out the auxiliary HD by moving everything onto the external (which took several days) reformatted the auxiliary, and re-partitioned it. (Thanks to some previous glitches being fixed, all of its available space-rather than something less than half-is now accessible.)
So the remainder of my task is as follows: Install Windows on a partition of the auxiliary; make the auxiliary into the main HD. Get rid of the little 30-gig that's currently the main; it seems to be dying. Get a new sound card, more memory, and probably a new keyboard. (Boyfriend spilled something on our one functional unit. The keys are now sticky. Current keyboard is on loan from roommate. Boyfriend is at risk of being forbidden from eating near the keyboard.)
With any luck, most of that will be handled sometime next week. We may still be out a copy of Microsoft Office afterwards. (OpenOffice is close, but not quite the same thing.)
So the remainder of my task is as follows: Install Windows on a partition of the auxiliary; make the auxiliary into the main HD. Get rid of the little 30-gig that's currently the main; it seems to be dying. Get a new sound card, more memory, and probably a new keyboard. (Boyfriend spilled something on our one functional unit. The keys are now sticky. Current keyboard is on loan from roommate. Boyfriend is at risk of being forbidden from eating near the keyboard.)
With any luck, most of that will be handled sometime next week. We may still be out a copy of Microsoft Office afterwards. (OpenOffice is close, but not quite the same thing.)