The morning after ...

The last update on the desktop post was about 4am. I'm really getting a bit old for that kind of thing ...

One huge improvement in Vista vs everything since Win95: sensible paths! c:\users\ellarien\documents is much nicer than c:\documents and settings\ellarien\my documents. On the other hand, the repeated confirmation dialogs when installing stuff are a little offputting, and there are a distressing number of features that insist on using IE instead of Firefox. The option to make the menus and windows look exactly like Win98 exists, and I used it; I may revisit that at some point, but for now it's nice to have things looking familiar.

On the hardware front, I'm moderately appalled that Dell seem to have managed to ship the thing without doing up the screws on the CPU fan, but impressed by the tech support guy who talked me through fixing it. The economics of that are interesting; half an hour of a call-center employee in India must be much cheaper than sending out an engineer to do the relatively trivial stuff. On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd be so sanguine about it if I hadn't done a certain amount of hands-on science in my younger days, which in the late 80's involved quite a bit of swapping cards and drives in IBM PS/2 boxes.

Woe!

So this evening, I dig out various driver disks and go to boot up Diamond, and -- as far as I can tell -- the hard drive is as dead as a doornail, not even trying to spin up. To add insult to injury, my attempt to contact last night's tech support person fell foul of some mailserver problem at my ISP -- I hope the webmail one went through, but it's hard to be sure.

Sigh. This is doing nothing for my productivity, either at work or on the novel.

Update: Boot order problem. (This was bizarre. After leaving the box alone for a couple of hours, and unplugged, it booted up fine. Which was good, because it seems to need to get to a certain point before it understands the keyboard to get to the BIOS menus.) Fixed now, apparently, too late to sensibly do anything else with the thing tonight.

I have set up ... well, more computers than I care to count offhand, in the last twenty years or so. I have *never* had this much trouble, bar the 1993 Packard-Bell 386 that died the crunchy death about an hour after I started.

Edit, 1am: I don't know, I really don't. Finally, I managed to introduce the beast to my nice mouse and keyboard and the USB hub they plug into (only for some reason the scrollwheel isn't working on Thunderbird and Firefox, and I'm sure it was on the old machine), and the printer. The wireless, for some reason, is acting excruciatingly slow and flaky right now, even though it claims it has excellent signal and nobody else is having a problem ...