For Thems What's Wonderin'

... yes, I'm alive, and well, despite not having a W-2 from Vanderbilt yet, and no further info from Metro's Finest on the whereabouts of a certain stolen Chinese Death Machine (gotta expect no real breaks in the case until the weather turns warmer, right?).

Last night was spent re-installing WinXP on the GWPDA Coalition notebook (or "tebo," as I like to call them, so as to differentiate them from those things schoolkids scribble in), since I was stupid enough to have my first PC nasty (Sasser, which is odd... the patch for it was included prior to SP2, so how was I NOT protected, Micro$oft?!?), and then, since I could not find the recovery discs, I stupidly used the IT guy's XP Pro recovery disc (which nagged me for a couple of weeks to "activate," meaning "authenticate," and which my XP Home product key was never going to allow to happen).

Now, it didn't take all night, actually. The first couple of hours, the landlord and I spent running various DVD-related errands, and I left the re-format and re-install running whilst he and I did that, and had a nosh. Came back, and must've hit the "any" key, 'cause I restarted the whole re-install process over. Dang.

Now, HP really screwed up. The recovery disc is two discs -- the OS recovery/reinstaller, and the apps and drivers disc. That latter disc was the problem. First, y'know how on a new install of XP, you have to spend some time reconnecting all your removable media and telling Windows, "Fuck no, I don't want you to do a GOTdamned thang when I plug this in!"? Well, before I could set up those annoying, one-thing-at-a-time preferences, oddly enough, the DVD drive did not try to use the autorun.inf. I found the setup.exe, and that damned thang wouldn't execute, either. So, for the few items that could not install a driver (audio, media card reader, ATI video card, modem*), I tried to install those manually. Nuguhdoit. I got the ATI driver from AMD's web site, and got that installed, no prob. Had to d/l and install .NET 2.0 first, but, okay. The media card reader, I got a Softpaq update, and that was jiggy.

The audio... no Softpaq nor any driver on the driver DVD worked, period. I had to do online chat with HP to get that fixed, and by 01:00, I was whole again (*save for the modem, which is fairly non-essential... now, in two weeks, when I'm stranded in Bumfuck, where only an emergency fax to someone will save my ass, and a toothless goob is waving a ready phone cord at me, y'all can laugh).

Now, for the software. Got the essentials (security, antivir, DVD backup, etc.), but still need to load Photoshop and Dreamweaver when I get home tonight.

Maybe there'll be some crappy kitty pixels up, later. :)
.