Windows XP Crap; Not My Fault

Yesterday I finally got around to backing up a client’s laptop hard drive onto DVDs for him. The laptop had motherboard issues and was 4 years old, so I simply removed the hard drive to hook up to my computer and burn some discs. Simple for a geek, right?

That’s what I thought.

Hooking it up to one cable, the computer wouldn’t boot: no operating system found. I tried another, same thing. I tried the last one, and I got a blue screen of death and an immediate reboot before it ever logged me in. I tried going into Safe Mode, and that froze for 20 minutes. Giving up, I slapped my stuff back together and turned on my computer to get my own, permanent error of no operating system found.

I’m sure it has to do with mixing old drive technology and new drive technology and will require a new hard drive to back up all my “little” drives, and then will still require another Windows installation to set everything in place. Gorgeous thought I had done something foolish with my system, and I was starting to wonder myself. Then, when I was lamenting in my chats while trying to get the darn thing back up, a friend said the same thing had happened to their brother when he tried to rescue a laptop hard drive. I didn’t feel quite as bad then.

I was able to get the computer to boot again, though only with the Windows CD in there. I’ll take it, for now. I have too much work to do to be concerned with making it perfect. I guess I’ll just be using my laptop more.

I am seriously considering trying to get OS X on this system after reading Lifehackers’ “Hackintosh” articles: Hack Attack: Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800 and
How To: Install OS X on Your Hackintosh PC, No Hacking Required

#$%#$% NTLDR Is Missing!

That’s the last straw! I’m getting a Mac. I’ve been working with and on IBM PCs for over 15 years now. There just comes a time and place where one gets sick of fixing their own darn computer, and I’m there!

It was supposed to be a relaxing 30 minutes of gaming before going to bed. Key words: supposed to be. Tuesday night, my favorite game, World of Warcraft, issued a patch that everyone got with their next login, and they are notorious for breaking the plug-ins and addons that we as dorks like to use. That seemed like the case Tuesday. I couldn’t summon my horse to ride around without the game crashing. When I logged back in, I was on my horse. Rinse and repeat.

I should take the time to interject here that I had to install XP SP3 RC2 in order to get the game to run AT ALL after their major patch 2 months ago. [Read more…]