A tale of woe that doesn’t appear to have an end.

About 3 weeks ago I dropped my laptop and knackered the hard drive. Anyone who has ever had to rebuild a computer knows the problems but believe me its a a real pain in the arse. Its not just the loss of data but downloading all the applications,  digging out the licence codes, figuring out the settings that worked or made life a bit easy.

That took about 3 days work, plus the couple of days trying to find ways of fixing it before accepting the inevitable.

Well, I’d just got that sorted and then fuck me, the desktop died. At first it looked like the config.sys file got corrupted so I then spent 3 days trying to repair it. No luck. I even tried to install windows on an external drive and change the boot up. No good. As a last resort I tried to reinstall Windows XP, no luck there.

A quick trip down to PC World and their verbal diagnosis was a motherboard problem. If I wanted I could book it in, £70, and they would have a look but it would take 4 weeks to get round to it. Hmm, its 5 years old and very slow so bite the bullet and buy a new one. Quick research and I like the ACER M7300 because I could remove the hard drives from the old one and slip them straight into an external bay and get back all my data and settings.

Comet had one so down there to pick it up. Is a real pain especially on a Saturday but never mind. I get it home, open the box and it doesn’t boot up. Fuck. Back down to Comet, manager puts it on the bench, fiddles about and it starts installing Vista. Great. Wait for it to finish booting, pack it up again, back home, unpack, plug in – no boot up. Fucking hell. Fiddle about, move PC, reboot and it starts again. Great. Vista starts to update, reboots and the boot fails again. Hmm.

Phone Comet help line. Curse waste of money because I know more than the shaved ape who answers phone. Give up on that.

Suspect intermittent fault. Friends coming so have to wait to Sunday morning. Back to store. Have to wait until Wednesday. No thanks I’ll have my money back. Long discussion they agree to deliver one on Monday.

PC delivered Monday afternoon. Unpack, plug in and, yes you’ve guessed it, no boot. Hmm, this is too much of a coincidence. Disconnect all hardware, including my external back drives and bingo!!! Full install, and start on applications. Still won’t boot with external drives but I’ll sort that later.

Now I have had Vista in my laptop and I really hated it, slow and nannying is being polite. Anyway, fighting to set up the network and no luck. Vista can see my laptop but laptop can’t see Vista. After a day of this I’ve had enough and buy Windows 7 upgrade.

That goes OK and the network set up is fairly straightforward, compared to Vista. Right we’re cooking on gas and time to setup my Dreamweaver environment. Dreamweaver installs OK but won’t start. Fucking hell. Adobe don’t support 64 bit but searching web says it should work. Down load patches for Acer, no luck. Run in various compatibility mode. No chance. I’ve lost count of the re-installs but its driving me mad.

So the last throw of the dice. Back to factory settings and lets start again but this time do all the patches before the first Dreamweaver install because I think there is a file somewhere that is really screwed and despite doing full uninstalls and searching for stray files something doesn’t look right. There is a process when I run Dreamweaver but it is hanging half way through the process.

So that’s where I stand today, waiting for all the reboots and patches to finish.

I may be posting good news later or I may be going on the piss to drown my sorrows if it fails.

So far I’ve lost about 2 weeks of my life stuck in the office sorting out fucking computers and I really do hate the bastards who can’t come up with decent hardware and software standards that take all this pain away. t can be done, a good friend went to Macs and hasn’t had a problem in a year, even with a wife who is less techie than The Great Wise0One. I should have listened to him.