Thursday, December 21, 2006

Oh, So _That's_ the Problem!


Written 20 December, 2006

P.C. Problems

II. Oh, So That’s the Problem!


How was I to know?

How was I to know the mother board support for my computer was by NVidia? How was I to know the NVidia file I uninstalled wasn’t the video driver at all, but the very software that made my PC function?

And how was I to know Bill Gates was about to make things worse?

I mean come on, I have to blame someone, right? Who better?

Although I have to say, it was a Microsoft engineer—and come to think of it, he was in India—who helped me identify the problem. He told me I had a hardware problem. My LAN port was out of commission. Sure enough, when I checked the back of the computer, there was no light on at the house of LAN. That’s when I realized what I had done.

Before that, though, and even before I talked to a single guy from India, I had backup.

I had imaged my boot drive to not one, but two other hard drives, using the manufacture-supported software that came with them.

Imagine my surprise, then, when neither would boot.

Back in the days of DOS, I would have simply typed something like xcopy c:\*.* g:\ /s /x, with x being whatever tag causes the system to be transferred. Now here I am, having trusted the software provided by Western Digital and Maxtor to image my drive, and the imaged drives have no system software!

Grrr. I hate when that happens.

As much as I rag on Bill Gates and Microsoft, I have to say that before November, I had never paid for a single Microsoft Operating System.

Well, I suppose I did indirectly, for my VIC-20 and Commodore 64 had MS BASIC built in, and every version of Windows from 3.1 to XP was bundled with computers I had purchased, but I didn’t have a Win XP installation disk.

On second thought, I did! I had the copy that had come with my laptop.

So I pulled it out and reinstalled Windows and it had a little problem and trashed the first drive.

Before it was over, both spare drives were trashed. And the original boot drive. Data were okay, though; they live in a separate hard drive.

And so I took myself to Office Depot (Fry’s being too long a drive for mere software) and bought Windows XP.

Then I did a new installation of Windows on a drive I had wiped clean.

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Photo: Flick your VIC

2 comments:

Melissa Yeuxdoux said...

That misconception (that you've not paid for a copy of Windows until now) is one of the big reasons MS does so well. You DO pay for it...it's in the cost of the computer you buy that MS has strong-armed the vendor into selling with every single computer sold.

Cheyenne Palisades said...

Thanks for pointing that out, Melissa. Even more reason to dislike Microsoft.