Monday, October 06, 2008
Seriously, how stupid can I be?
Now, don't answer that...I didn't expect to be introducing my new squeeze this way, but thanks to my blockheadedness, I can't give Brownie the rightful welcome it deserves. In less than three weeks as its owner, I almost single-handedly destroyed my spanky new Acer Aspire One netbook. Arggh. I'm so ashamed of myself. I'm r-e-t-a-r-d-e-d. Like seriously.
So. I was trying to install Microsoft Office into Brownie. And since Brownie doesn't come with a cd driver cos it's so tiny, I decided to run the MO cd in my other laptop, copy and paste the entire cd into my hard disk, and then transfer the content into my netbook. Everything went as planned, until about 13 mins left in the installation process, Brownie stopped moving and became perpetually stuck!
In my horror, I tried to ctrl+alt+del but no response. Then I pressed esc and nothing happened. So I force-shut down Brownie by holding down the power button. Thankfully, that worked. But when I tried to turn it back on again, it went back to the same 13-min installation screen instead of the usual desktop!
Being the tech idiot that I am, I frantically started making calls to see if anyone could help. Then earlier tonight, when I was sharing my woes with Sol (while staring hard at the 13-min installation screen), I saw what the problem was. I installed the wrong freakin' cd! Instead of installing the Microsoft Office cd, I installed the Windows XP one - which has already been installed into Brownie when I first bought it...And because of that, the entire system went haywire. It's like buying a new bed for your room when you already have a bed, and that'll cause everything to be disorientated because there simply isn't enough space for two beds. Ggrrhh!
My saving grace, thankfully, was that I surfed around for online help forums and someone said that I should enter alt+F10 when I start up the computer. I tried it and Acer automatically rebooted the entire system - removing the redundant Windows XP, and restoring my settings back to normal. Phew! The only problem is that I've lost whatever data was left in Brownie previously. But then again, it's a small price to pay for my stupidity. Well technically, I wasn't so dumb after all cos I managed to fix the problem.
So, Brownie and I are off to a fresh start again. Hopefully, I won't be hitting the alt+F10 anytime soon. (God bless us both.)
The disk that should have been...
The disk that was instead...
