My laptop shat itself this morning. Well, the windows on it did. Given it’s Vista from when it was new and it survived two years of crap with no problems, I think it did all right really. I had a feeling that this might happen, so last night I cleaned it out and decided I’d try Vista’s backup your PC option. Supposedly it grabs an image of your PC so that you can restore it to exactly how it was, no problems and all. Sounds like a great idea, yes? I thought so. So once I’d pulled the hard drive out of the laptop, attached it to my desktop and recovered all the important files (I don’t trust backups if I can avoid it..) I booted the laptop into its recovery partition and let it do it’s thing. Bing bang bong, I’m back at a clean, fresh windows install with all the drivers and what not required for the hardware in there. Nice. Time to try this Recover your PC thing. Ahh.. you have to boot from a Vista CD/DVD or external boot device that has the software on it. Damn, that was a big waste of time then. Oh well, I’ll boot from the Vista DVD I have lying about.. different version, but it might work. Tops, into the Recover Full PC option. Time to sit back and watch my laptop restore itself to its former glory… hang on, the only option is to format the entire hard drive. Shame about the recovery partition on there. If it were my desktop, shame that the Vista partition is the first quarter of a striped pair of hard drives. Shame that for the majority of users (assuming that the majority of brand name PCs nowadays come wth recovery partitions.. I think they do..) this wonderful Vista backup software will remove any option of a full, vanilla system rebuild. This makes it worse than useless, it may actually void the warranty for some machines. It wouldn’t surprise me.. certainly it would cost users a bunch of cash to have the partition restored or for the manufacturers to post out discs to recover from if required. Idiots… Vista backup software gets -3 pears.
Speaking of laptop irritation.. it also turns out that ATi don’t provide direct drivers support to their mobile chipsets. All driver updates must come via the manufacturers of the machines.. which sucks when the manufacturers can’t be bothered and only offer the ones that were available at the time the laptop was first released. One of the reasons I bought the model I did was its graphics chip.. I wanted to use it as a low end gaming machine on the odd occation. This endeth that option.. Left4Dead runs terribly on it, but newer drivers could likely go a long way to assisting that. Con sarn it.
If you are a universal doner your blood group is type O.
I’ve no idea what type mine is…