Windows 7: You made a friend

I just had to do some home surgery. Son dropped laptop, and hard drive didnt
recover. Shame, since the harddrive was supposed to be able to survive
these (thats what Compaq/HP says on the sales blurb; me - I never believe any
of that :-) )

After a quick, "what next? dash to the stores?", decided to reclaim an unused
spare 80GB laptop drive and go with that : zero cost fix.

So, onto the Windows Vista recovery disks we made when the laptop
was new. Great, after 3 CDROMs (or were they DVDs?), we reboot and
we get a nice "Windows cannot proceed with the installation" type
dialog and reboots. Nothing, including safe-mode will work.

Quick google search: you cannot install Vista from the recovery disks.
Pardon? Like most PCs out there, they all ship without recovery media, and
you have to make your own. I do hate that. Its a "con" for the general
public and they dont realise it. I have a copy of Vista on DVD, but
after trying that, that was going nowhere fast.

So I tried the Window7 recovery disk - and it worked a treat. It installed
(despite the recovery disk being for a Dell), and a short time later,
a fully functioning Windows 7 install. Wifi worked; laptop screen
resolution was spot on, and absolutely nothing to dislike.

Of course, it doesnt have a license, and sooner or later, Windows 7
will remind us. But I dont really care. I paid for Vista - twice, once
for a machine that never needed or used it, and once for the compaq, which
lost its hard drive, and for which the recovery disks were a waste of
life spent making them. (Maybe I can salvage my sons core data: itunes library,
and firefox bookmarks, but he isnt that fussed).

World-of-warcraft is busy downloading updates, and he is using the
other PC until he can get a few seconds to walk across the room and
carry on life as if nothing bad ever happens.

All the time, I am wondering: there must be more to life than
watching progress bars on screens.

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