What a pointless day. The first few hours were good – I got Kim’s new laptop all up to speed, restored her fifteen gigs of images and docs, got her new laptop all cozy and good.
Then I began work on her decrepit, old laptop.
To call it decrepit isn’t fair. Originally mine, it ran Gentoo like a champ for years before I gave it up to the wife. At the time, I had alternatives, and her desktop died, making the decision a quick and easy one. We put 2000, then XP, and off she went.
At some point in the Microsoft patch cycle, they killed the cd-rom functionality on the lite-on slimtype combo dvd/cdrom. Oddly, DVD’s are fine, as are self burned cd’s (I suspect because I tend not to close the disk). But commercial disks go unrecognized.
Today, with absolutely nothing to lose, I went at it full tilt. Firmware upgrades, patches, random suggestions on the web, all went tried, all with the same dismal lack of success. My final try was to completely reinstall XP sp3.
It too failed. Or rather, it worked great up to the point the cd rebooted into windows, and which point the cdrom stopped working.
Gah. A whole day trying to get this stupid cdrom working again, and all I have accomplished is making the laptop slimmer with what’s installed.
Promise, the holiday spirit will visit shortly, just needed to get that off my chest 🙂 Restless girls are clamoring to go to bed, how can I turn that down??