Everybody lies

posted on Sunday, September, 23rd, 2007 in default

This morning, all I wanted to do was copying some data from my new external hard drive to my laptop. Should have taken me all of 10 minutes. Then again, I just wouldn’t be me if anything technical worked at the first try for me. So instead I had a very entertaining day trying to get everything to cooperate. (click on the photo, if you wanna see the chaos in close-up)

Naturally, as I really should have known before, it this copying just didn’t work. Which was mainly my own fault, because the first thing I did with the new HD was formatting it to NTFS. And as we all know, Windows 98 (on which my laptop runs) doesn’t recognize this. But obviously I couldn’t re-format it again back to FAT32, because by now I have all my data on there (ok, I have it all on DVD as well, but still…).

So, after a little panicky check of the prices for laptops on ebay, and of the still almost non-existent contents of my banking account, I knew I had to find a solution to this problem other than just buying a new laptop. This was made a teeny bit more complicated by the fact that my laptop, a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook B-2175, isn’t built anymore, so there is not exactly an overabundance of facts about it on the Fujitsu website. Nor in many other places on the net. I had to dig quite deep to find anything at all, really. Am I the last person on earth to use this model?

Well, considering it has got only a Celeron processor with 500MHz and 128MB SD-RAM, I could actually understand that, you know. I love it anyway, but today I seriously thought about getting a newer model, or at least updating this one a bit.

Then, when I checked the system requirements for Windows XP, I got my first pleasant surprise of the day: from the official Microsoft website it sounded like Mitchell (yes, I give my computers names) would be able to run WinXP after all. Yay!

Well, of course, it wasn’t quite as easy as I would have liked to install XP either, on account of Mitchell only having an external CD-drive, which he doesn’t want to boot from. (The floppy drive has died a while ago and I never bothered to replace it.) So I couldn’t delete Win98 and format the hard disc, but had to install XP over the Win98 installation. Usually I hate that, but today I didn’t care. There were lots of false starts and setbacks, and the installation itself, after I finally had worked out how it would work, did take more than an hour, which didn’t bode too well for the performance of the system afterwards. Interestingly, now that I have tested it with my usual applications (Word, Photoshop, Dreamweaver), I must say I’m quite impressed with the little one. Of course it is slower than my desktop computer, but it is way faster than I ever would’ve thought possible.

Well, but the real fun only started there, because after installing WinXP I had to re-install the CD driver, which is a bit of a problem when the computer doesn’t recognize it’s CD drive. Thank god for flash drives that need not be installed anymore. So that was a bit cumbersome, but not too complicated. The really unpleasant thing was trying to find a new driver for the touch panel. You see, the reason I love Mitchell so much (besides the fact that he only weighs about 1,5kg and fits in my handbag) is the fact that I don’t need to use a friggin touchpad, or even worse, a wobbly trackpoint thingy in the middle of the keyboard. No, with Mitchell I just use a pen or my fingers to point and click directly on the screen. Well, I used to anyway. But, not surprisingly, the driver for Win98 doesn’t work with WinXP, so I had to surf around to find a newer version. This took me almost half the afternoon. I must have tried 4 or 5 different ones. But finally, finally, I found one that works. Yay again. (A quite tired yay meanwhile.)

If tomorrow I get the internet connection to work again so I can update everything that needs updating, I will be a happy camper. For today I don’t even want to think of computers anymore.

So, how was your Sunday?