My wife, having retiredfrom her longtime employment in the local community college wanted a new computer. (We have several in the house, of course, but she reasonably wanted one devoted strictly to her use.)
After carefully reviewing options for a modern laptop — and after Fry’s unconscionably refused to deliver a Sony they had agreed to sell us — went to the local Office Depot where we selected a Compaq laptop with a slowish (1.73 GHz) dual core processor, 2 Gigabytes of RAM, a nice looking screen, Wifi, built in Web Cam and about everything else we wanted except for built in BlueTooth. (So we’ll buy a dongle and plug it in to one of the three USB ports.) The machine had only one basic flaw: it came with Vista Home Premium with Service Pack I and the store wouldn’t arrange for a downgrade to XP.
The whole thing cost about $500 which seems to be a reasonable base price for a base laptop these days. You can pay lots more for faster and more powerful, but we thought the machine reasonable for e-mail, surfing, word processing, digital pictures, DVD burning and playing and so forth. In fact, we’ve been writing about a $500 price point for basic computing for many years. The only difference is that a modern $500 computer can do a lot more than a 90s $500 computer, and if you buy it in Euros, it costs even less.
We had the machine for less than a week when the WiFi just stopped working. No Internet. I could have plugged in a wired connection to the Internet, but that would have been too much effort. Not that it was fun to spend literally hours on the phone with HP technical support, but after a lot of testing and trying various approaches, the Tech Support person gave up and suggested the final remedy: re-install Vista.
Reinstalling the Operating System is a pain, not because the procedure is complex or time consuming, but because the process brings your computer back to the state in which you bought it. Gone are all the changes you’ve made. Gone is the customization of existing software. Gone is the new software you’ve installed. Gone are the documents you’ve saved to the hard drive, including your Outlook contacts, events and e-mail, the digital pictures of your grandchildren, the MP3s you downloaded from iTunes, the eBooks from Fictionwise and the audio books from audible.com.
You can back up your documents (including the Outlook PST file) to your backup hardrive, and a lot of the folks who sold you content will let you download it again, free of charge. (And digital rights management may prevent you from transferring some locked files back to your “new” drive.) So you prbably won’t lose much, but it is an aggravation.
But as this computer was almost brand new, there was little material to back up, and we could easily download Open Office and Firefox again, so we agreed. The huge hard drive — 250 Gigabyte — included a backup partition containing all that was necessary, so we just pressed (figuratively) the backup button, let the machine run, and went to dinner. When we came back, a new machine, and WiFi worked fine.
What was wrong? I can only assume there was a Vista problem.
And things were fine for a couple of weeks, until suddenly FireFox wouldn’t run because of a corrupted file.
> “What did you do dear?”
<”Nothing”
> “Well reboot and it will work.”
< “I did that. Still doesn’t work.”
> “OK! I’ll get to it”
Should be easy. Right? Should be, but this was Vista. Wherein hangs another tale.
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