Windows continues to make my life more difficult

The Backstory

What can I say that no one else has said before? Deliberately having avoided Vista like the plague for the past year, I’ve continued to hack at one project after another with my “trusty” 17″ HP laptop. When i purchased this puppy a year and a half ago, it was a purchase out of necessity. I was commuting 2.5 hours each way every day from my home in upstate new york to my office, which at the time, was in manhattan. The work days were long, very long, and since I was finding myself taking work home with me almost every night and weekend, I needed a portable solution. Long story short, I bought the HP because I couldn’t afford the (twice as expensive and seemingly comparable, non-intel) macbook at the time. The HP came with XP Media Center edition, which was basically just a few bundled apps that I never planned on using, and a glossy look to the task bar and window chrome, whatever.

When I brought the box home I was surprised to find out that despite the fact that this was a brand-new-in-box laptop, there were not any installation cds or dvds that came in the box. I flipped through the “getting started” manual, which came in the form of a semi-large two sided poster, to find out that on one of the two hard drives there was a partition for software recovery. And why did they do this? I can only guess to prevent this fancy Media Center edition from being distributed. And when contacted HP about having them send me an XP Media Center disk, they said none were available, and this version of XP I had was only available as an OEM install… aka: disks didn’t exist. The searching I did for a box copy at the time reinforced what they told me. So here I was, pseudo-proud owner of a brand new laptop, with no way to re-install the OS that it came with (and I had paid for) without completely setting it back to showroom fresh and wiping all my data.

From then till now

Some time during the first few months I suddenly lost my ability to access the “Add/Remove Programs” app, and kept getting a Run DLL as an app error that forced me to close the window. Googling provided no solutions, so I grabbed myself a copy of Cleanse Uninstaller, an ugly but effective app that let me get rid of anything I no longer wanted. Stuff like Adobe CS2, random betas of browsers, all of those really stupid bundled applications, etc.

Next to quit on me was the slick little media buttons above my keyboard, which I now know can be fixed by unplugging the power supply, removing the battery, and holding the power button down for a couple seconds to expend all of the electricity in the chipset. Ok cool, sure, no problem.

Then print-screen started taking these awesome 2 color screenshots that were incredibly lovely large images of all black with a sprinkling of white in there so you know it was doing something. Then the heat-sync got clogged with dust (pics of the rebuild here), etc, etc, etc. You get the point.

A new beginning?

With the news of XP Service Pack 3 hitting the streets, I was hoping that many of the stupid little things that just make my time spent on this laptop less than enjoyable could now be corrected. But… I stand corrected and end this post, typing on the trusty OSX machine that sits under my desk, with the following screenshot.