Me Blog!

It’s enough to drive you to drink.

A friend bought a new laptop for his son recently. Nothing special about the laptop, an Acer Extensa 5220 but quite nice nonetheless as a surfing, mail and watching DVD’s machine. They bought in mid April and it went kaput 5 days ago so he asked me to take a look.

Like a lot of new laptops it came with Windows Vista. That was almost enough to make me tell him to bring it to someone else but being the nice guy that I am I told him that I would take a look. I powered up the laptop and it went through it’s loading screen and then the screen went black. Then nothing.. Nada.. No disk activity of any sort.

Naturally my mext step was to boot it up into safe mode. It got as far as loading crcdisk.sys, did a bit more chugging and then nothing. I asked them was any new software installed and they said no. So I delved into have a look.

• I used the Acer utillity partition to check for problems and it found none.
• I used the Acer utility partition to do a system restore except it couldn’t because it couldn’t find a restore point.
• I used the Acer utility partition to check the windows partition and it did nothing.
• I booted up with logging enabled except logging wouldn’t work because it couldn’t get far enough into the boot up process to write the log to disk.
• I booted from Fedora 9 installed on a USB key and checked all the partitions and couldn’t find anything wrong.
• Removed hard disk and ran a virus scan and malware scan on another machine and no results.

It was just impossible to diagnose. No files in the System32\Drivers directory has been changed since April last and that would have been on it’s very first boot. I checked the Windows update log via Fedora and the only updates installed were for Windows Defender.

Poking about the net came up with loads of people with almost identical problems with various hardware combinations. All had varying degrees of success but most ended up having to reinstall. I even searched through the Microsoft support site and couldn’t find anything even remotely like a solution.

Windows bloody Vista just decided to stop working for no earthly reason. So the only option left was to wipe it and start again from the restore CD’s except I couldn’t. Because Acer don’t supply a bloody restore CD with the machine! That wasn’t much of a problem though because my friend asked me if I could install XP on it instead. That in itself was a whole other nightmare and it goes something like this:

1. Boot from XP CD.
2. Setup fails as it can’t find a hard disk hard disk.
3. Boot up into the BIOS and change ATA mode from ACHI to IDE mode.
4. Setup finds the hard disk and goes through its process.
5. I browse the Acer support site looking for XP drivers.
6. I find XP drivers and download them on to a USB key.
7. 45 minutes later setup is complete and I proceed to install the drivers.
8. Half the drivers don’t work because of hardware not being present in machine. Despite being the very drivers for this model laptop as advertised on the Acer site.
9. Try to find the exact drivers that I need and fail.
10. Boot up from Fedora USB key to use Linux to identify the correct hardware.
11. Download and successfully install most of the proper drivers for XP.
12. Cry with joy and then realise what time it is. It’s been hours since I started! Where did the time go?
13. Barebones OS installed on laptop. Proceed to install XPSP3
14. 20 minutes later everything seems to be peachy. Although audio doesn’t work all of a sudden WTF?
15. Remove Audio device from device manager, reboot and then windows installs driver for audio that was previously installed. Reboot.
16. Audio works! WTF?
17. Bluetooth doesn’t work. WTF?
18. Download all versions of bluetooth drivers from Acer site. None work.
19. Give up. The 12 year old whose laptop it is probably won’t use it anyway.

We can learn several things from my escapades today.

Firstly Windows Vista is the biggest, stinking, steaming pile of shite that Microsoft have ever foisted on consumers but we know that already.

Secondly retro installing XP on a new machine isn’t going to be all that easy anymore since it is becoming harder to find XP drivers for new hardware. So be prepared to have to suffer with Vista or just remove it and install Linux instead. I recommend Ubuntu.

Thirdly, before buying a new laptop or PC it is well worth checking to make sure that it comes with restore CD’s/DVD’s of some sort before handing over your cash. It will make life easier for when Vista will go belly up. And you can be sure that it will go belly up.

Finally, I’ve decided that as and from today I am going to go purposely out of my way to avoid Vista if at all possible.

Now it’s time for a stiff drink so I’ll be off then. I think I’ve earned it.