My Laptop Experiment

My aunt gave me her old laptop a a present. She told me that I can’t connect to the net with the wireless card she gave me until I wipe it clean, and redo Windows from the beginning. So yeterday, I sat down with the Dell Inpirion 8000 laptop he gave me, and set about installing first Windows ME, and then XP.

One problem I had to solve was getting in to the BIOS setup program to change the boot order of the DVD-ROM drive, so that I could boot into the Windows ME CD. I called Dell, they asked me the typical account stuff, then gave me some garbage about change of ownership, and then finally told me that there a no way on earth they could tell me over the phone how to open the BIOS setup without me paying. So I said goodbye, and got on the Dell website later in the afternoon. I did a bit of creative searching, and landed myself in the community forums0 (even though the result above that was a knowledge base article with eactly the same info I needed, jut clearer).

The Windows ME install went pretty smoothly. I poped in the CD, and it asked me a bunch of questions, and it got to work, reformatting the 10 GB hard drive, and installing a very basic system setup. I got some low resolution graphics driver, and lots of stuff was generic too.
I then proceeded to install Windoows XP Home Edition. I popped in that CD, and got the nice XP installer. It was all relatively straightforward, just had to answer a couple of questions.
One XP was installed, I started getting environment ready. I installed AVG Antivirus Personal and ZoneAlarm, and started changing Windows’ security settings. In the process of doing that, I changed my administrator user’s password multiple times, and ultimately forgot the password.

At that point I started thinking, and come up with using the Recovery Console, but since it require your admin password, I just gave up, and re-installed Windows, wasting another few hours (at that point I didn’t know about the tools around for recovering admin passwords).
I have to say this was one productive and exciting day, experiencing Dell’s horrible support, and the installation routines of Windows ME (of blessed memory, since its support was ended months ago) and windows XP. It required patience, which ultimately led to reward. And I like rewards (especially for not doing anything).