#&$%^*@ Pewlett-Hackard, Compuke, etc.

Just venting. I'm one of those cranky types who'll look a gift computer in the port.

I wrestled with an otherwise very decent computer for way too long today, and I have another couple of notches on my hate-gun for manufacturers that make it as hard as possible to rebuild. The case is the worst bloody bugger of its size I ever. I had to unplug everyfarkingthing and take off the CPU fan to get another drive in. Then I couldn't use that as the boot drive because of one of those idiotic speeeecial MBR cockups. I had all the good stuff copied onto the (insert exotic cussword here) nicely partitioned drive.

Now what? I didn't want to wipe the "new" computer's original drive because I wanted to keep some things...nemmine the details. Boot from the BartPE CD again and play drive-pong for another hour-plus? No, screw it, I just switched jumpers, want both drives in anyway. It takes just as long to install all the other software, but most of it needed updating anyway.

I still have to clean up the mess I made. All on my own sweet little volunteer time (iz a non-profitz). *sigh*

On the good side, it's great to have something that doesn't take two minutes to open a bleeming window. My co-workers will lay chocolate upon my altar. Too bad none of us care about all the games installed in it

Oh, and I am thankful not to be an auto mechanic.

We can has lotsa gamez. But it took me another five hours (including cleanup and dishwashing) to straighten out some small part of Saturday's tedious process that went wrong. Blackie was having total sith-fits today. It took me hours to get to the relevant error report, Windwoes was nearly catatonic about it. Then I gritted my fangs and summoned the System Restore demon, restoring Windoze good humor but wiping out half of yesterday's tweaks and proggie installs. I may never know exactly what horked it.

But...whew.

I hope...