Saturday, July 01, 2006

New Computer and Parts

Well after over a month of waiting and shopping around. I have a new laptop. For those that have not heard the old laptop story here it is.

My laptop screen died and I sent it off for warranty to replace it. They called me back and said that it showed signs of physical damage like it had been dropped. They thus refused to fix it and sent it back. Upon inspection when I get it back, it did show signs of being dropped but not from me dropping it. After complaining to the people higher up, they decided to give me a new laptop or a gift card. Begin the new machine was only slightly better than my old one (4yrs old), I took the gift card. Then I got this
HP dv5215us.

I am happy with it so far though I am not sure I will ever use all the features of Media Center Edition. Nice to know I have them I guess. I was happy with the lightscribe, 1gb RAM, and 64bit processor.

In parts, I bought a new 320gb hdd. My secondary drive only has 5gb left. At first I will just use it to install XP 32bit to use at the
LAN Party. After a small problem (apparently my motherboard default resets to seeing the ATA drives as the boot drives instead of the SATA ones) I have it up and formatting.

I think I may have to reinstall Windows. The Battlefield 2 Demo killed my Alcohol virtual drive capabilities and I cannot find how to restore them. Reinstalling Alcohol just puts me into a infinite loop on driver install and reboots. If anyone knows how to fix it fell free to let me know. EA sucks. They screw people up on FREE DEMOS when they might use their virtual drives for right reasons. For example, all my MSDNAA software.

Will keep playing with my new machine for now, tell next time...