Friday 13-apr-07
Maybe I should just shoot myself in the head?
Ok, here is part of the new computer story. It arrived at about 8:30 on Monday morning. Oh, life was good.
Then I unboxed it. Put it up on the kitchen counter. Plugged it in. And, it booted into a boot-load-startup-crash-reboot-etc loop. And, it seemed to have the wrong flavor of Vista. I managed to stop it. Booted it into safe-mode. The drive seemed to be a 40gig C partition and the rest was apparently unformatted. And the disk had definitely been used. Calling up "run" indicated that "run" had "ran".
No joy. Get my trusty Ubuntu disk. Boot that up. Ubuntu runs fine. And, there does seem to a 40 formatted partition and 160 gig D partition that isn't formatted.
Ok. Ring up HP. Press 1 for Spanish. Remain on the line while we round up someone in Mumbai. All I want to know is "Can I do a recovery from my recovery DVD which I paid extra for. Which is for the correct Vista. Without messing up my warrantees or the MS Activation system?" Madam you must reset the BIOS. Madam you must restore from the "Recovery Partition" BUT I DON'T HAVE A RECOVERY PARTITION - MY DRIVE IS FUBAR". Well, Madam, you will have to send the computer back. Why can't I try to recovery from the DVD? Madam - you will have to contract the return department and return the computer. I call the return department. (By then I was ready to pitch the thing off the balcony.) The return department - also in India - sent me to an "expert" who had almost no English language skills - But, this guy said sure - try the recovery DVD.
Started the recovery DVD right after lunch and it was finished by dinner time.
That was Monday. On Tuesday - the software adventures began.
More on that tomorrow. The list of softwares that work without problems is very short.
