Solo Technology

Few days back I mentioned I was reloading my work laptop ^[1]. Over the weekend it became one of the most annoying projects I’ve had in a long time.

Install 1:
Booted from XP CD. Format and install went fine. Headed to Toshiba support to grab the drivers. Oddly, only two driver packages were listed. One for wifi and one for the software modem — And they didn’t do anything. Decided to try adding Service Pack 2 (shuttled over via USB drive) and re-install. Still nothing. Hmmph.

Install 2:
Dug out the old restore CDs . Running through these should give me an install exactly the way it was when I bought it (*shudder* that’s a lot of extra gunk installed!). Took two tries though. Four CDs into the first try, I bumped the keyboard while on the “Insert Next CD” prompt. Couldn’t tell which button was OK and which was Cancel. I guessed poorly. It ended abruptly. I said dirty words.

Started again and after five CDs it was done and restored. That’s when I looked at the 6th CD and saw it labeled as “Drivers and Apps”. Heh. Ok, that’s what I was after to begin with.

Install 3:
Back to the XP CD. Booted from it, formatted (again! and by now I’m doing Quick Format). Once XP is up and going, toss in that 6th CD and run through all the drivers. Rebooted a few times along the way. After the last thing was installed, did a final reboot and… nothing. Shell won’t start. Nothing to see. Broke.

Seems one should pay more attention to what order one installs those drivers.

Install 4:
A lot like Install 3, but I was very selective about what I installed from the drivers — and in what order I ran the installers.

A few hours of Microsoft Update and a few hours of installing software later and I have a functional, noticeably faster and hopefully more stable laptop.

This morning, our CTO IM’d me to ask if I’d like to be one of the first guys to try out Vista. On this same laptop. Ironic.

^[1]: Oh, and I forgot to mention the awesome Consolas font in that original post. I love it for Notepad++ and Visual Studio. Well, awesome if you’re using ClearType. Speaking of which, don’t forget the ClearType power toy for LCD (and Microsoft) users.

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