I knew my excitement at picking my laptop up from repair this morning would be short-lived. Off I trotted as early as I could, collected it with its new hard drive installed, brought it home and went to reinstall Windows XP. Oh no, not that simple. It followed the same routine it had before I admitted it was dead, gave me the same error message (including the suggestion that I remove any recently installed hard drives - yeah, right, I was going to do that!) and wouldn't play.
So 20 minutes later I was back off to the repair centre, clutching the laptop (having decided throwing it out the window may not be the best thing to do), every bit of paperwork that came with it, and the XP disk. The woman behind the desk looked a bit surprised (and somewhat disappointed) to see me back so soon. One of the technicians came down to play with it and after 10 minutes of changing the settings in the boot menu (let's face it, not something I was likely to have been able to do) pronounced it ready for XP to be reinstalled. Not that I didn't believe him - well, maybe just a little - but I insisted on staying there while it was reinstalled. Fine. All done. So back home with it.
Transferred a few things from my external hard drive over to it, sorted out the appearance settings etc, then decided the time had come to flick the switch and try to get online.
Wireless switch flicked. Nothing. No icon for wireless network or anything even similar. Off to Control Panel with me. Searched for my internal modem which I know is in there! Nope. Machine insists I don't have a modem of any kind, internal, external or anything else. Oh yes, I do, I shouted at it, pointlessly.
None of the paperwork that came from the shop with it is of any use at all. I don't have software for the modem, I don't even know what it is so I can't search for any info on the net using Eve's laptop. And even if I could, it's not like I could download the driver etc for it to my laptop because......I can't get on the net.....because apparently I don't have a modem!
I'm going round in circles. At the rate I'm going, I will have to lug it back to the UK, take it back to where I bought it and get them to sort that out. Meaning until my trip, I'll still have to rely on Eve's laptop for all net stuff.
Also, without the net, I can't download any of the programs I need to actually use the thing for anything useful. I want Picasa, various spyware/anti virus stuff, Live Messenger etc etc. I don't have a WP prog of any kind cos I left the Word disk in the UK but I can't download Open Office as a back-up.
Back to a quill pen and a bottle of ink I reckon!
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