I spent basically all of Sunday proving I’m a techno loser. First I tried to reinstall WinXP on my laptop. The laptop is an engineering sample of a model that originated in Japan so support for it is non-existent. This is what you get for trying to save a buck 😉

Anyway everything goes smoothly including wireless internet, until i realize the video is unaccelerated. That’s right, Windows can’t detect the video card so it’s using its default driver. Ugh! many hours of fruitless searching later, still no joy. So I decide to proceed with a linux install (which was part of the reason I was re-installing XP to begin with, so I could get linux on the thing). Linux goes smoothly and even detects the video card, except it’s detected it incorrectly and has video artifact problems. Drag the mouse across the screen, leave a trail of mouse poop. Pull down a menu? There’s nothing in it! But wait, wave the mouse around over it and stuff appears. Oh joy.

Anyway 8 hours later I have a laptop with not one but 2 basically non-functional OS’s on it. I gave up in frustration and played Indiana Jones. Nothing cures a pissed off Dave like bashing Nazi bastids for a couple of hours (Indiana Jones is a blast btw).

Tonight I am back at it with the laptop, we’ll see how it goes.