Finally!

My laptop came back to me on Thursday. I spent that evening and Friday evening reloading programs onto it since they had reformatted the hard drive to fix the wireless card issue. Well, that's what I did until it finally gave me just a blue screen along with a nice error message. But even before I got that, something just didn't seem right about it.

Turned out that, when they reformatted my hard drive, they installed an earlier version of Windows XP. I don't know if that was what caused the error message, but it sure seems suspect.

At any rate, when I got home from alumni band on Saturday I decided to use my recovery CDs to reformat the hard drive once again in an attempt to save my laptop. I figured it couldn't hurt anything since it was unusable in its current state.

Luckily this worked and I am now cruising along with use of my laptop once again.

What bothers me is that I've always had such positive experiences with Gateway up until now. I bought my desktop from them over five years ago with no problems at all. And, up until this summer, my laptop has been great. Whenever anyone criticized Gateway products, I was the first to speak up about how great mine were. I guess I won't be able to do that anymore. And I don't know what I'll buy the next time I need a new machine.

But in the meantime, I'm so happy to have my toy back!