Monday, July 16, 2007

The portable worries

I had to do it from the beginning!! Wipe the slate clean and make sure that the wiping was good. Then start off with the whole nine yards all over. And so far it’s been nothing but a pain in the wrong place!

For those of you wondering what I am going on about, “it” is my laptop. Which has been the center of my undivided attention for just about the whole day. Actually it's the center of my attention everyday since it happens to be my work lappie! But today was different. For a change, today, it wasn't my work that was keeping me glued to it but the fact that the laptop was refusing to work. Why? The other day the maintenance guy came to look at a fairly long standing issue with my m/c and decided I better go in for a complete OS transplant rather than trying to fix the issue (I think he wasn't sure why the issue was happening in the first place. That's why he took the easy way out! Ordered the transplant). There it was. The doctor had decided it had go under the knife. So on came the portable hard disk and off went the contents: from the bowels of my machine into the welcoming bowels of a stand alone hard disk. Then the doc took over, and like I mentioned in the beginning, the slate was wiped clean. Off went the current, faulty, having-a-long-standing-issue installation and on went a clean, wet-behind-the-ears version of the same OS. And with that the lappie was signed, sealed and delivered. To proud me; proud because now I had a m/c with a fresh OS installation. It doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore but hey you live and learn!! And learn I did, the hard way because now, none of my previous settings are available. None of my shortcuts are around. None of my applications are present (but of course! What did I expect!!?? But it's a pain nevertheless!). And as if these weren't drawbacks enough, I couldn't start doing my customizations as soon as I got my m/c back because the whole 'download and install security updates' thing for the OS took the better part of three hours (that’s close to half my working day!!). And to add insult to injury, sort of, my mail application doesn't work and I know next to nothing about setting it up.

So there you have it, the rest of day down the drain. Ok it's actually not that bad, but yes I could have done a lot more than I managed to today. And that means my work load for
tomorrow has just gone up!

No comments: