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