The Saga of the New Computer [Part the First]
For the last year or year and a half, my home PC has gone through several annoying issues. I've wanted to replace it (or at least parts) for a while, and probably would have, if my income was still at its 2004 level. Instead, I've gone through several iterations of the equivalent of bailing-wire and bubblegum repairs. Some will be horrified to hear that the case has been permanently removed, so that I can reach in and jiggle things when the power supply fan starts making too much noise.
About mid-August, I decided I'd had enough. I looked at Dell's supply of heavily discounted, back-from-lease systems and chose one. Complete with shipping, it was $170, give or take a buck. Since I chose the cheapest shipping option, it took about a week to arrive, but I expected that. I cleared space on the desk, set up the new computer, and booted it up. I'd bought it as a system without an operating system, but it turned out to actually have Dell's "wipe the PC and reinstall WinXP" application set to come up at boot time. Since it wasn't installing Vista, I let it go ahead and run, which took several hours and at least three reboots.
I then tried to repartition, which ran into the first hint of trouble. But I managed to find a partition manager that worked, so I divided the hard drive in two, leaving one that I meant to load Ubuntu on unformatted.
Then the trouble began. The system refused to boot from the several-releases-old install disk I had handy. No problem, I thought; I'll just download the current release, burn a CD, and install from that.
No luck. In a week of fiddling around, I discovered that this system would read any shrink-wrapped CD that I cared to try, but wouldn't read any CD that was written on my old system, laureth's system, or even that it wrote. While I didn't test every single "drink coaster" I made, those I did try were legible to every other system I tried them in.
By the time I reached this conclusion, it was Labor Day Weekend, of course. So I resolved to call Dell tech support after work.
The live person at the other end insisted that I needed some special software for a CDRW/DVD to read ordinary CD-R disks, and that he'd be sending me it on CD. Personally, I think he's most likely stalling. This is far from the first CDRW I've used, or even owned, but none of them have had DVD capability. It'll be interesting to see which of us turns out to be right.
I'll admit, my concerns were mightily eased over the weekend, when I discovered a sale wherein several CDRW/DVD drives were on sale for prices between $20 and $25 (plus shipping, I imagine). If Dell's only offered solution winds up being to return the entire system to them, at my cost (for about the price of one of those drives), I'll probably opt to just replace the drive on my own. Even though the sale I saw will be over, it seems highly unlikely that another won't come along.
About mid-August, I decided I'd had enough. I looked at Dell's supply of heavily discounted, back-from-lease systems and chose one. Complete with shipping, it was $170, give or take a buck. Since I chose the cheapest shipping option, it took about a week to arrive, but I expected that. I cleared space on the desk, set up the new computer, and booted it up. I'd bought it as a system without an operating system, but it turned out to actually have Dell's "wipe the PC and reinstall WinXP" application set to come up at boot time. Since it wasn't installing Vista, I let it go ahead and run, which took several hours and at least three reboots.
I then tried to repartition, which ran into the first hint of trouble. But I managed to find a partition manager that worked, so I divided the hard drive in two, leaving one that I meant to load Ubuntu on unformatted.
Then the trouble began. The system refused to boot from the several-releases-old install disk I had handy. No problem, I thought; I'll just download the current release, burn a CD, and install from that.
No luck. In a week of fiddling around, I discovered that this system would read any shrink-wrapped CD that I cared to try, but wouldn't read any CD that was written on my old system, laureth's system, or even that it wrote. While I didn't test every single "drink coaster" I made, those I did try were legible to every other system I tried them in.
By the time I reached this conclusion, it was Labor Day Weekend, of course. So I resolved to call Dell tech support after work.
The live person at the other end insisted that I needed some special software for a CDRW/DVD to read ordinary CD-R disks, and that he'd be sending me it on CD. Personally, I think he's most likely stalling. This is far from the first CDRW I've used, or even owned, but none of them have had DVD capability. It'll be interesting to see which of us turns out to be right.
I'll admit, my concerns were mightily eased over the weekend, when I discovered a sale wherein several CDRW/DVD drives were on sale for prices between $20 and $25 (plus shipping, I imagine). If Dell's only offered solution winds up being to return the entire system to them, at my cost (for about the price of one of those drives), I'll probably opt to just replace the drive on my own. Even though the sale I saw will be over, it seems highly unlikely that another won't come along.