FreeBSD, beer and possessed hardware

Warning: the following is rife with geekiness and profanity. So just fucking deal with it.

All right... So my flatmate's computer is fucking possessed. I have no other words to describe this.
It all started about 3 weeks ago when Windows Me (that being the most modern Windows operating system his accursed machine would run) up and decides out of the blue to stop recognising the wireless NIC that was installed.
So he reinstalls it, reboots... and discovers that Windows has removed TCP/IP entirely. What's that mean? No networking. None. The machine has decided to become a hermit and forswear the company of it's own kind by isolating itself.

After much ado, and fairly gratuitous use of the word "fuck", he gave up on Windows Me, and asked me if I had any ideas. So I gave him the install CDs for FreeBSD 5.4...

...and it was good. The OS is fairly solid (this is a direct descendant of BSD UNIX... as is Solaris, AIX... this is real UNIX, not some userland lashed to a kernel with duct tape... that's right, I said it you Penguin-minded dogmatists... accept it, that's your development model), the KDE GUI is easy on the eyes and surprisingly modern... expect the fucking drivers for the wireless card won't load... the damn thing cannot seem to get an IRQ.

I should back up and mention the hardware. This is an old school Pentium II 266 MHz machine. How old school? EDO RAM. I shit thee not. But it runs the newest RELEASE of FreeBSD and does so well, so who cares?

At any rate, there was further gratuitous use of the word "fuck" on this revelation. So, we did what was necessary. Grabbing 3 cold beers each, we built and installed a customised kernel for the hardware in question.

And then there was yet further gratuitous use of the word "fuck", this time employed with "motherfucker", "rat-bastard" and "ill-tempered son of a bitch".

Well, the upshot is dude has a working machine with absolutely no networking... so I borrowed a crimper from work, made sure the box of bulk Category 5e cable still has enough on the spool (thanks for the gift Jer...) and I'll be grabbing some cable ends on the way home.

If I can't make the sonofabitch network the plan is to overclock it to death. This should be fun.