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HP Pavilion s7712n Slimline PC

so i made hasty yet somewhat educated purchase of a pc this week to fill in for the mac i lost. on sale for $499, the pc was/is a good deal 5 usb ports, a firewire port, built in card readers, dual core intel processor --good enough to run my image editing software. the only problem it had was that it came with Windows Vista built-in.

So last night i began the processor of trying to install install windows XP, which normally means erasing the partition. except the partition with vista installed was not showing up in the boot screens. so after spening hours trying to figure this out i called on the tech genuis Mike Hauswirth who guided me towards this nifty nuking program which can be booted from a usb stick or cd-r as opposed to a floppy disk (i mean the computer has no floppy drive).

This meant another 4 hours of erasing a 250 gb hard drive. i of course fell asleep and woke up at 4 am this morning to the sight of the computer ready to be formatted. so installed the XP i had "acquired" with one registry error. but i still worked when i finally ran it. except that my Ethernet was not working which meant my computer was not recognizing my broadband connection. being that this is a dual boot capable computer. i installed 2000 next, ignoring the fact that my time to leave for work was looming. and once again not Ethernet, no ip address showing up.

So i am here at work and have just finished downloading a bunch of networking drivers from the Intel website pertaining to my particular chip, and drivers from the HP site, because HP did not give me a backup disk for the pre-installed programs and files i would need in the future. (BOOO!)

Add to the fact that i lost my wallet on Tuesday and this has been a crappy two weeks.