S3

Been inactive for few days, my daughter poured water on my Toshiba A105 S361 laptop, I cleaned it in time, and it worked for few hours, and suddenly encountered hal.dll file missing. I tried to run the recovery CD which I got when I bought the laptop, it ran for an hour or two but couldn't recover my laptop.

I was so pissed off in that heat of the moment, I installed Ubuntu erasing complete windows and formatting the drive. It worked for few hours, but then I got into some linux issues, like sound was not working, encountered Error 16, inconsistent file system stuff quite a few times whenever I would reboot my laptop.

I downloaded Open Suse distro of linux, I installed it erasing complete Ubuntu, it worked for and hour or so, but when I rebooted to check if it works, I seen same error which I encountered with Ubuntu. Well this is not getting any funny, I became so serious after frequent pesterings from my wife that the laptop became useless and that I shouldnt spend much time on it instead buy a new one. Well how can I leave my one and half year old kid like laptop, and being a geek sort of person how can I leave the job in between, I skipped going to gym, I was adamant that I could fix the laptop tried re-installing Ubuntu again and faced the same problem, spent rest of the night googling the web, raising questions in the Ubuntu forums, couldnt find a solution which fixes this issue. I retired to bed in the early hours to spend at least couple of hours before I resume the job. Even in my sleep I could just see the beautiful features of Ubuntu and dreamt about using them. I told myself in sleep that I would do it somehow, I will do it, I can do it like "Batti Vikramarka".

Next day I took the laptop to my office so that I can escape the frequent pestering' s and disappointments of my wife that I am not spending time with the family. Well as any married geek is, I am married twice, first to my job, and then to my wife. And I always partial to my first wife more :). Well in the office I could re-install Ubuntu again and this time not using my brain too much, I just followed the installation instructions on the ubuntu site, I could see the screen and after one fine solution to fix the sound issue from the ubuntu forums. I was happy. Like anyone would I rebooted few times to see if I again face the Error 16 or any new kind of issues, I didnt. Then I wanted to take one step further in installing KDE desktop Kubuntu. Well I again read the installation instructions and then followed the same. I really enjoyed the look and feel of Kubuntu. It did work and I tested it rebooting it quite a few times. I was thrilled and was extremely anxious to show my wife that I did it, I did it this time. I showed her the KDE version of desktop to impress her by the look and feel of it. She felt happy and gave a smile surprisingly.

I wanted to hit the gym and make up for the lost time the day before, I was wearing my gym clothes and heard my wife shouting that laptop stopped suddenly. And then when I saw it myself I couldnt believe, I couldnt turn the power on of my laptop.................

So the moral of the story is I could have easily solved the hal.dll file missing issue by just taking my laptop to the experienced technician or to BestBuy where I had an extended warranty. Its just that I dont want to handover my laptop to BB after I read horrible stories on the net about their GeekSquad. In the end I tried with an experienced technician, he took $40 to diagnose and spent and hour on it just cleaning the dust inside the laptop which accumulated by our kind of use. I ordered a new Dell Vostro 1500 laptop on dell site, took my old laptop to Bestbuy and handed over it to them expecting nothing much from them.

By the way I just remembered this " A stitch in time saves nine". I could have saved not nine but $700 :). I could have bought Canon Rebel Xti which I been planning to own for quite sometime.