Computer blown up already? Share your tech present nightmares
Happy Christmas, or whichever holiday you celebrate. Frankly it doesn't matter; as long as you are with family or friends, it shouldn't matter about the minutia of festivities.
But how many of you have already spent most of the day trying to get the damn thing to work? How many of you have bought a new laptop, or netbook, or iPod and tried to get it to charge, or activate, or even phone home?
The time is now to share your stories.Bitch, moan, whinge, shout, scream; above all else, treat this like your one minute of solace. No doubt you'll feel much better for it afterwards, and you might even get some help from someone in the ZDNet community too.
I'll start you off with mine. I got a netbook today: a Toshiba Mini NB250, my new pride and joy. The device is brilliant. It's fast, it's capable, it's well equipped for what I need it for, and it was recommended highly by my colleague, Mary Jo Foley. Considering she's been doing this job for far longer than I have, I took her word for it.
What I didn't count for were two key factors in my stressful day. The first is crapware, where many of us have bantered with before, and the second is downgrading from sluggish (on a netbook) Windows 7 down to reasonable and compromising Windows XP - without a CD or DVD drive.
Downgrading has been an absolute nightmare, but with a USB stick, a downloaded copy (not through torrents, obviously) of Windows XP SP3 and sheer bloody determination, I finally booted into a working version of Windows, where I could install it again and do it properly.
I am so over the moon with my choice of netbook; it's been far too long coming, to be honest. But if it wasn't for Toshiba throwing more crapware at their devices than a slinging contest, I wouldn't have had half the trouble.
Wanna moan? By all means.