Today, I had a new batch of students for a COMM 0004 course. Yet, I spent most of the morning installing things on my notebook. A few weeks ago I discovered that this Gateway 3522GW cannot handle Windows Vista due to an incompatible BIOS. I had the notebook with me in New Hampshire and realized I need it most for email and net access when travelling. So, I can continue to use Windows XP until I'm ready for a new device.
I had half installed Vista though. It left lots of junk on my hard disk. It also required quick action upon boot-up to force it to load XP rather than trying to complete the installation of the new operating system. I decided to format the hard drive and load up a copy of XP Pro that I had.
Starting from scratch takes a great deal of work. For example, the wireless connection didn't load from the Windows disc. I had to search at the Gateway site to find the file. Then of course it and others needed to be copied from my other computer via a writable CD. When I did get access to the Internet, there were more than 70 updates from Microsoft. Loading up the necessary MS Office programs took a while too. I also needed to get McAfee up and running. There a dozens of small tweaks still required!
All that rigmarole and my afternoon class is why I'm typing something here now (on the notebook by the way). What a long winded excuse, I guess.
