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On Friday night my trusty laptop died.
I got back from Chrissie's leaving drinks and was chatting over MSN with Vian. While chatting, applications such as Firefox were quitting for no apparent reason, with that annoying "send a message report" message. That happens sometimes, I wasn't too concerned. I also got a couple of BSODs which is substantially more unusual. So I had to restart a couple of times, but things were working.
Saturday morning I woke up with the intention of watching the latest episode of Lost I'd recently downloaded. But old laptop was having none of it. The first time I booted up I had similar problems to the night before - everything worked fine for a while, but applications were crashing and I got a BSOD. I restarted a few times but the problem got worse and worse, until I was unable to get past the boot sequence. I tried both my Knoppix live CDs, but these suffered similar symptoms - so I'm not sure if it's a HDD problem or deeper-lying hardware fault.
So - I could either piss around and waste time with it and try to get it fixed, or just bite the bullet and buy a new machine - which is what I am typing this entry on now. So that quandary has been answered. It's not the best machine in the world, but I don't play games anymore and this is fine for web browsing and MS Office and just about everything I need it for. Bone of contention: Vista. Yes, it's as annoying as everybody says.
Except - I can't use my MP3 player with it. And I am FUCKING GUTTED. Basically, the drivers don't work with Vista. The way to get it working (from the Creative knowledgbase) is apparently to upgrade the firmware of my Zen (on an XP SP2 machine) and then I can sync it through WMP10 (that's 10 - I'll have to roll-back from 11). Of course, I don't have a functioning XP machine (at least not with the drivers installed) so I can't do this. Fucking hell. And even if I manage that, there's no cast-iron guarantee that I'll be able to use my Zen on my new machine because I naievely installed the XP drivers first, which may cause some problems. Gak.
So, a bank holiday weekend that I hoped would be fairly relaxing has turned into a dull tumble through updating/configuring/installing this laptop. Tomorrow I'm going to try and find Vicki a birthday present - I hope inspiration strikes in the next few hours else she'll get smelly stuff again.
About the only good thing to come out of this weekend was I learnt how to pull out an old hard disk, stick it into a caddy and put my old data onto my new machine.
I should have gone shopping today, but it's too late now.
What a waste of a day. I guess I'll play a bit of guitar later.
I got back from Chrissie's leaving drinks and was chatting over MSN with Vian. While chatting, applications such as Firefox were quitting for no apparent reason, with that annoying "send a message report" message. That happens sometimes, I wasn't too concerned. I also got a couple of BSODs which is substantially more unusual. So I had to restart a couple of times, but things were working.
Saturday morning I woke up with the intention of watching the latest episode of Lost I'd recently downloaded. But old laptop was having none of it. The first time I booted up I had similar problems to the night before - everything worked fine for a while, but applications were crashing and I got a BSOD. I restarted a few times but the problem got worse and worse, until I was unable to get past the boot sequence. I tried both my Knoppix live CDs, but these suffered similar symptoms - so I'm not sure if it's a HDD problem or deeper-lying hardware fault.
So - I could either piss around and waste time with it and try to get it fixed, or just bite the bullet and buy a new machine - which is what I am typing this entry on now. So that quandary has been answered. It's not the best machine in the world, but I don't play games anymore and this is fine for web browsing and MS Office and just about everything I need it for. Bone of contention: Vista. Yes, it's as annoying as everybody says.
Except - I can't use my MP3 player with it. And I am FUCKING GUTTED. Basically, the drivers don't work with Vista. The way to get it working (from the Creative knowledgbase) is apparently to upgrade the firmware of my Zen (on an XP SP2 machine) and then I can sync it through WMP10 (that's 10 - I'll have to roll-back from 11). Of course, I don't have a functioning XP machine (at least not with the drivers installed) so I can't do this. Fucking hell. And even if I manage that, there's no cast-iron guarantee that I'll be able to use my Zen on my new machine because I naievely installed the XP drivers first, which may cause some problems. Gak.
So, a bank holiday weekend that I hoped would be fairly relaxing has turned into a dull tumble through updating/configuring/installing this laptop. Tomorrow I'm going to try and find Vicki a birthday present - I hope inspiration strikes in the next few hours else she'll get smelly stuff again.
About the only good thing to come out of this weekend was I learnt how to pull out an old hard disk, stick it into a caddy and put my old data onto my new machine.
I should have gone shopping today, but it's too late now.
What a waste of a day. I guess I'll play a bit of guitar later.
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