Windows tolerance? Almost two days.
After a day and a half trapped like a rat on Windows I snapped and went into a spasm of hardware shuffling to get one of the dead macbooks operational. Fortunately one of the white 13" macbooks came back to life after I put a hard disk into it (after first prying out the rubber rails, which had come loose and were wedged around the SATA connectors at the back of the disk bay) and taped a power cable to the side of the case (because one of the less desirable misfeatures of macbooks is that if they sit unused for a while the batteries explode – the battery pack on this (or my other dead 13" ‘book; I’m not sure which one I pulled it from) had not ruptured, but was starting to look quite a lot like Mr Creosote) so that I could use it without having to sit absolutely still for fear of dislodging the magnetic connector.
The teeny detail that I no longer have any usable USB ports is something I’m going to have to deal with later today, but in any case I’m sitting in front of a Unix machine (with a decent GUI instead of Echh-11.) Thank goodness that one of the 4 corpses could be brought to life again, at least for long enough to keep me away from windows until my bigger macbook returns home.