Monday 1 February 2010

Ah, the joy of non-functioning software

While blogging on Friday went off into the 'Net without any trouble, things quickly went pearshaped from there - with the wlan on and off again and on and off and finally off only. And then something in the innards of Windows, in the regions where the little drivers sit and make their thing, digested itself. And it was not possible to put that Humpty Dumpty back together again - so I finally had to reinstall Windows.

Let me tell you: That is quite an experience. I think it must have been a dozen times that the computer booted and did something (always stating "setup is preparing your computer for first use") and then re-booting. After a while of this continuous rebooting game with things done inbetween, it cried for the supplementary driver CD (which it got) and then had some more quality boot-and-reboot time. And then it actually finished.

On the down side, that now means that I have to re-install the ten or so programmes that I had already installed. On the up side, the pre-configured and pre-installed computer came with about 30 Gigabytes taken on the drive C. Thirty Freaking Gigabytes! For the operating system! I remember those times - that are not so very long gone - when a whole hard disk with 30 Gigabytes was a huge disk, and a very modern (and expensive) thing to have. Maybe I have lived under a rock the last years, but do operating systems really need to have so much disk space? I had very much planned to use the extra GBytes for storing more photos and documents, not more system. Well, after the re-installation, the new system takes up only (only! hah!) twenty gigabytes. That's ten more for me (once I figure out if some partition magic programme can shift partitions on Win7, that is).
Oh, and the connectivity problem, by the way, is not completely solved yet - though we now have a better idea what might cause the problem. So there will be some more configuring fun in the next days.

On the non-so-software-front, not too much got done (obviously) - a little bit of sewing on the tent and a little bit of knitting. I hope to get the hat testknit finished today or maybe, if I can't find much time for that, tomorrow.

1 comment:

Primitive Rob said...

Hello! Just bloghopping. Great blog!

Happy blogging! :)