I’ve been having problem with my natural born, G-d given equipment — herniated disks leading to some sort insult to a nerve with pain radiating down my left leg — not something particularly nice, and pain making it very difficult to walk, sit or almost anything in between. The pain relief people are working on that with steroid injections. (Guess I’ll have to give up my baseball career…alas)
Even worse — no, it isn’t really worse, but it is irritating if not actually painful — is a laptop that can’t seem to find its built in WiFi ethernet port, and several other items of hardware. Windows XP’s System Restore can’t find a decent restore point, the New Hardware Wizard in the Control Panel opens by won’t populate. and the Hardware Device Manager won’t open at all.
When I run msconfig, and click on the boot.ini tab and the trace command, I’m told that the system doesn’t recognize the line in the boot.ini file that says:
[Operating System]
multi(0)disk(0)partition(1)\winnt=”Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition”/fastdetect
That sounds pretty promising. Obviously, for whatever reason, that particular partition seems unavailable. I pull as much data as I can from the hard drive on the laptop…at least I can read most of it…to my external hard drive, and take the thing back to BestBuy for repair. (I never purchase an extended warranty on computer hardware, but when I bought this laptop, I decided to give BestBuy’s service contract a try.)
I’ll get into dealing with BestBuy’s “Geek Squad” in a later post. Or that may be a continuing adventure. But it is amazing how quickly one can become accustomed to having your computer, and the Internet, available wherever you happen to be in the house, in the office, in the coffee shop, in the public library. Typing on a desktop computer is easier, but a portable laptop with WiFi quickly becomes addictive.
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