PC’s…

Well, having been a happy Mac user for a while I re-dicsovered PC’s this weekend, and the frustrations they bring to life. I have an old Toshiba 3110, that came with Win98. I thought I’d zap the hard disk and use the ‘recovery CD’s’ to re-install a fresh copy of Windows.

Big mistake, when I bought the laptop the supplier had ‘run-out’ of the official external CD drive that shipped with it, so they gave me a different brand. Well, here lies the problem, 7 years later I find out that the boot floppy with the recovery CD’s doesn’t recognise the CD, and the disk with the CD has drivers that don’t recognise it either!

So I’m stuffed. I’ve spent hours this weekend trying to get Windows OR Linux on the machine with no luck. I’ve even put the hard drive in an external USB enclosure, copied the Windows CD contents onto is using another machine (PowerBook) and tried installing from these files, but that’s a no go as well, there’s no ‘setup.exe’.

The shop I bought it from went out of business about two years ago, so I’m on my own. I’ll give it another go tommorrow, if it doesn’t work out it’s going in the bin!