Friday, July 14, 2006

Laptop woes

After nearly 2 years and a month of working at Trilogy, they finally decided to give people at my designation some real laptops. Well, I did have an IBM 600X before this, but that was so stone age, that it was embarrasing to show it around to others.

As it happens, we are getting some spanking new Dell Lattitude D620 to replace both my desktop and laptop. While I do feel that my productivity will drop by around 25% in moving from two computers to 1, I still did opt for this because the new laptop is kinda cool!

I did figure that the image that help was ghosting on to the laptops was kinda wierd, so I asked them for a factory piece along with the CDs so that I could install things myself to my satisfaction.

In some of these respects people like Dj and myself are both boon and bane for the sysadmins. Boon, because we take several things like this off their shoulders, and bane because we know our stuff (or atleast we think we do), and usually bug them a lot more than the average user.

In any case, Dj and I both walked off with a factory fresh laptop and the cds, and set about reinstalling Windows from scratch, in tandem, kind of doing the same things.

Except, after we had finished installing Windows, and then installed the motherboard drivers, my laptop crashed.

A fresh install of windows, with just one driver update and it was corrupted already.

An even more interesting event was that I was able to recover using the Windows Recovery console by expanding just one missing file (SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\PCI.SYS), and things are back on track now.

Sitting at home and formatting the other drives, I decided to make this blog post from the spanking new laptop. Its kind of sad that I'm doing this using IE. I haven't gotten around to installing Opera yet because the partitions are not formatted yet, and I decided to put up with this just this once.

All this while I was still trying to get some work done on my old laptop. Contrary to point 12 in this joke, it does seem that computers do behave like women sometimes, and my old laptop just BSODed on me twice in the span of ten minutes. Talk about jealousy!

I have yet to put this new laptop next to my desktop. I hope it takes this more sportingly.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Similar thing happened to me - the morning I was supposed to get this new laptop, my 600E stopped working, it would crash every time I inserted my PCMCIA WiFi card into it!

brilliantnut said...

Hmm.

I guess our good ol' ThinkPads are indeed feeling the pinch of the lack of attention.