Hell yes (about my computer again because it's totally fixed and everything is good)

I am happy to report that for the first time ever, I am posting from school without any fear of my computer spontaneously crashing on me. If it seems like I'm overdone it with the posts on this topic, well, I agree. In my defense, this was all pretty ridiculous. So to review, on the old journal, it went like this...

New computer for the first time since I don't even remember when...
"The only problem is I forgot to get a mouse, so for now I'm stuck with this silly touchpad (my old mouse is totally incompatible with this newfangled technology). I'll remedy that soon enough." Hahahahahahahahahaha. So much for that. How young and stupid I was three months ago.

I spoke too soon
"Alright, so not having the mouse is not the only problem." No, it definitely wasn't.

Waiting for a response
"I'm bummed out about this upgrade thing, perhaps more than I should be." Somehow I still hadn't realized that the upgrade was the least of my problems.

Hooray for computer issues...
"So in addition to still not having this upgrade thing sorted out, now my old computer has a problem." Oh no, the decade-old computer with too little remaining diskspace that hadn't been defragmented in a year suddenly had a glitch with one web browser that went away after the computer was restarted. The horror, the horror. Actually, at some point in this mess, I started referring to that machine as "old reliable" because I could actually use it. Later that epithet would take on a new meaning, because when I'd restart it while trying to connect it to a network with this one for file transfer, it would reliably take 20 minutes to boot up to the point where I could actually do anything.

Back to school tomorrow
"I still need to buy a mouse for my new computer. And I still haven't resolved the upgrade thing yet, although it seems that we are making progress. For now, that is all. It's not much, I know. But there will be more later. I hope." Well, still no mouse. But I do now have a new mousepad, which I won as a fabulous prize in statistics class. By this point, I must have been all too familiar with the computer's tendency to crash, but I hadn't posted about it. I had talked about it on instant messenger, but because some quick web searches had revealed that the display driver being named in the blue screen was associated with Windows Vista, I assumed that the upgrade would do away with the problem.

At school now
"I have arrived and finally managed to use GRCC's internet—with my laptop. Oh yeah, never done that before." Ah, the beginning of the quarter. And here I thought I'd mainly be using my own personal computer at school rather than the ones in the library or technology center. Heh. Wrong!

Really wanting that upgrade now...
"Stupid Windows Vista crashed on me while I was typing an entry and so, because LJ is also stupid, I lost what I'd typed." Windows Vista didn't crash on you, moron. Your broken computer crashed on you.

This should be easy...
"But you know what, I'm going to take it as a sign that yes, I really, really do want to do chemistry professionally and...okay, Windows Vista crashed again. I'm done. I hate Windows Vista." Again, misplaced blame. Windows Vista isn't that bad. I mean, I'm glad I got my upgrade and all, but I don't know why I was so quick to blame the operating system here. Must have been the stigma. I'd heard bad stuff about Windows Vista so I assumed that it was the source of all my problems.

The saga continues
"I had to scan my receipt and photograph the sticker on the bottom of my computer and send those images to them...and damn, the display driver crashed my computer again. I was going to tell the rest of this story first because I thought I'd finally gotten it to stop. But no. So my computer is still not functioning properly. Awesome. I guess my next update will be from the old computer then..." The plot thickens.

New computer saga continued
"I did some troubleshooting and at this time I have no idea if my computer will crash again. I would like for it not to." It totally was going to. Hindsight. If only I had it before stuff happened.

Inexplicable slump
" I received my new hard drive and installed it. And I shipped the defective hard drive back to them, but I'm still waiting on my recovery disk, as the new hard drive is blank." No, danger. Mayday. Mayday. It isn't the hard drive. It's the motherboard, you fool.

Sleep vs. Homework vs. Neither
"The issues with this computer might finally be resolved. I'm not positive yet." They weren't!

Wherein I explain just what the deal has been with this new computer thing...
"She also gave me the idea of running the test on the hard drive again to see if it was a coincidence that I had both this problem and a bad hard drive or if this problem is some sort that might have messed up the test on the hard drive (i.e. the motherboard is screwed up and it caused a false positive on the test). I actually did that just now and it turned out that it was a coincidence: I got a hard disk test pass this time." Yes, parentheses. You're right. If only you hadn't been so...parenthetical?

So cool...
"Anyway, I am tired and I am waiting for FedEx to deliver my computer, which probably isn't going to happen because the company has a rule that if a signature is required, they can only attempt to make the delivery when you are not home." That was when I was waiting for it to come back from the repair center for the first time.

For a minute there I thought I actually had a working computer...
"Are you surprised that this crap isn't over? I sure am. Yes, indeed, I am shocked. I am absolutely taken aback. Didn't expect this at all." That totally wasn't sarcasm or anything. No sir, no sarcasm there.

Things have been more annoying recently than they were a little less recently
"Why would they need me to sign for an empty box? Why? It's empty! Am I supposed to be worried that someone would steal my empty box? It's empty. It has nothing of value in it. Just give me the damn box. But no, not without my signature. This sucks." In case you couldn't tell, I was really pissed off about that.

The end of the computer saga (I hope)
"I'd like to get acquainted with my new computer for real this time and put all the software I want on it and everything like that, but it's dead week, so the timing isn't the best for that." And now it's finals week and I'm at school posting here instead of studying. Priorities.

So yeah, three months, two trips to the repair center and back, two operating system upgrades, one hard drive replacement, one memory replacement, and one motherboard replacement later, I'm finally confident that my "new" computer is 100% functional.

On Monday night, I attempted to connect both of my computers as a workgroup via local area network in order to transfer like 10 gigabytes of files from the old computer to this one. I say "tried" but actually, I eventually succeeded. It wasn't easy, mostly because of how inaccessible the option is, both in Windows 2000 and Windows 7. After a number of methods that just didn't work, my web-searching eventually turned up something that got the computers recognizing each other. That took like three hours, in part because of how long it took to access my old computer after restarting it, as I was restarting both computers multiple times. But then I had to figure out how to disable the password requirement for one computer to access the other. I made a shared folder on this computer that I could copy stuff to on the old computer, and began moving stuff, which took a long time, probably because of the slowness of my old computer. So yeah, that's done with.

Oh, time to go to class. Bye now.