Golden Deer Pub Community Forums

My system is supposed to go to a Recovery menu if I hold Alt + F10 while Windows is beginning to start (POST, I guess it's called). Whenever I press these keys, all that happens is that a black screen with a cursor at the top appears, it waits for a second, then top half inch or so of the screen gets all messed up with pixels (I wish I knew how to describe it better), and the screen completely freezes.

Am I doing something wrong? I don't know of any other way I could get my computer to be restored to factory settings. I sure as hell don't know how to create partitions or any other technical skills.

I haven't purchased a computer wholesale in awhile since I do nothing but my own builds, just find it odd that you're literally given nothing here since that's not the standard practice. Though, it may be an OEM/System builder's copy, I guess, and not a licensed one, per se, so it's not like they can give you a copy legally but ... or ... something. Look, I don't fucking know~~~

Seriously though, the lack of a USB bootable download option via, say, their website is rather ridiculous, scummy practices of retail aside.

Look, if you have a student account, Windows 7 is dirt cheap via Microsoft's website and you can get it digitally.

If that's not an option, you can do some googling to find illegalz copies of XP to use just to replace yours since, again, you've technically purchased it as is. Where this falls on morality is up to you.

There's also some methods to do without resorting to new Windows installs primarily. There's which you can use to create a USB bootable system restore utility, though some of it you may not want to mess around with too much.

If the recovery partition IS there then there's some tricks to be done to force booting into it.

[spoiler]And then there's the open-source route of just going after a Linux variant but then you have the pretty shitty/elitist Linux community. Yes, yes, they're not all terrible but goddamn if that's not the prevalent attitude.

And the fact I can call them elitist is pretty damning, amirite?![/spoiler]

Urgh. Lack of recovery media for netbooks is a common PITA I have when having to reinstall the OS (which is invariably Windows XP). It's not the basic reinstallation process that's the problem, though. It's all the vendor-specific hardware that XP doesn't have built-in drivers for. And of course the network adapters are in that list so I can't search for drivers online using that machine, and of course vendor support sites tend to be just the most convoluted, hateful piles of flaming shit, argh. Although, the missing drivers thing may just be due to XP being so damn old. Perhaps Windows 7 is fine in this regard, I dunno.

Jubelon, in addition to finding an XP ISO somewhere as Scy mentions (morality aside), you may have to search for drivers specific to your model.














Re. Linux on the Desktop: *snrk* (still)

Windows 7 is pretty much a walk in the park, barring the whole network driver fiasco. At least, as far as I'm concerned from a system builder perspective. Motherboard comes with a CD for the necessary drivers (and, failing that, it's available online in a Catch-22 situation of awfully hilarious) and everything after that is almost 100% handled by Windows 7 in the background without the user needing to jump through hoops. As far as ease of use for users, it's pretty damn good.

I cherry pick my Graphics Card drivers; I just let Windows 7 do whatever with the rest. I'm lazy.

[spoiler]This is why I hate retail machines; any computer issues comes down to the fact that the support for it basically involves a clunky convoluted sacrifice ritual to complete. Building your own at least gets better quality parts that, surprise surprise, tend to have better support and ... you know the parts! It's so much easier to diagnose an issue with the actual hardware in mind.

Not that there's much choice for building laptops/netbooks but just wanted to throw this out there.[/spoiler]

Yeah I traditonal have been agaisnt builds. Because I know nothing about coms. However I have a couple of friends help me build one so I have been thinkin about it. The only com I wont want a build on is laptops.