The hard drive on the family laptop died in December, so we bought a new desktop. We got an HP Pavilion Slimline – small but still a desktop. I thought it would be nice to go back to having a desktop to get the better display and regular size keyboard. And, NC state employees get a nice discount with HP.
Well, we got it and like it. We had a small problem with the monitor (a bright yellow, one pixel wide vertical line on all the time) which they replaced quickly. The hardware is a nice jump from our 4 year old laptop, and we didn’t know how much we missed having a number pad on the keyboard.
However, it also came with Vista. It is pretty and has decent navigation. It didn’t take long to get used to it. But, the problems soon started. About every 1-2 weeks we got the blue screen of death (BSOD) and had to restart several times before Vista would start again. Explorer also froze whenever we copied, moved, or even renamed files. Updates didn’t help, and sometimes had a BSOD while installing them!
So, we finally got sick of it. One of the advantages of working at WCU is that faculty and staff get a discount on lots of software. I got a copy of XP for $10 and installed it. I have to give it to HP: even though their policy is to only support the pre-installed operating system, they pointed me to all the drivers I needed (except for the modem – which I found myself). It only took about 1.5 hours to go from Vista to fully running with XP AND all our necessary software.
Updating XP through dial-up took longer, but at least it doesn’t crash regularly. Now if we can just get DSL...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
You should have gotten a Mac. :)
Well, I don't have a cushy campus minister job that lets me afford one (he he).
Actually, being the technology guy at work has its advantages - I recently requested a MacBook Pro to replace my aging laptop. We have quite a few Mac users in the college and being able to dual-boot is helpful there.
And I get to pick the specs :)
I HATE Vista!!!! My laptop is Vista and I'd replace it in a heartbeat if I could. :( lol Glad y'all were able to get a new computer. :)
I've got a macbook pro with 4gb of ram... I'm loving it. I use VMWare fusion to run XP Pro from within the Mac OS... or I can dual boot. You could even get a copy of linux and run it through the virtual machine... get your geek on, boy!
:)
The scariest part of the post for me: "Updating XP through dial-up..."
Post a Comment