XP Bad Boy

What's got me all worked up in this photo? Besides the Metra train schedule for the Chicago to Kenosha line? It's the fact that I got Windows XP to run on a Toshiba Satellite A215. It took some doing. Probably resulting from some Faustian deal with Microsoft, Toshiba sells many of (possibly all of?) its consumer notebooks with Windows Vista. The woman who bought the notebook, a co-worker of mine who is just starting to explore the possibility of life after the University, wanted things to work as much as possible the same as her desktop, which runs Windows XP. I offered to help her as a favor. This led to six tense hours yesterday as I installed XP (easy!), downloaded additional drivers from third-party sites (less easy...), and finally went searching for the drivers from step two that did not install properly (very much not easy at all, except that it involved little physical effort). If worse comes to worse, I reasoned, I could always reinstall with the original system DVDs and offer my most profound apologies for wasting everyone's time.

I hate that crap.

So I sweated through it. My earliest breakthrough was installing the display drivers. I can always tell on a laptop (or any flat panel) when the display is set to a nonnative resolution. Everything looks soft and weirdly fuzzy. Once I got that down, I tracked down wireless drivers, which helped me bootstrap the Ethernet drivers into the machine. The last little bit came when I got the SD card slot driver to work. Now when I looked at the Device Manager, no little yellow icons with exclamation marks peeked out at me. The machine was clean as a whistle. I only had to patch it.

More than a hundred updates later, and it's still going. I can't wait for SP3.

I'm also wearing that expression to make my hair look smaller. I've got a proper 'fro going on and badly need a trip to the hair cuttery. Soon.