yargh

Well, yesterday, my workstation here at work blew a gasket. It just froze up and didn't respond to they mouse or keyboard. I cycled the power and it wouldn't even POST. So, a fun afternoon of repeatedly trying to get one of the three it people over resulted in someone finally coming over around 10 this morning. The conclusion was pretty much what I expected: Something on the mainboard went splat.

Looks like there's not an identical unit they can swap it for. I was really hoping they'd just toss the drive in another tower and that'd be it. Instead it looks like I now get to go through a bunch of stupid bureaucracy to get a replacement. On the plus side, a new machine would likely be an HP. An actual name brand instead of the no-name stuff the company is/was leasing. On the minus side, it could take anywhere up to six months before I get it.

Until then, I have a no-name laptop. One of the type that folks have no end of problems with around here. Huzzah. 'Course I also get to wait forever for someone to 'recover' the files from the old desktop's hard drive. Then I get to try to find the cd's and keys to reinstall the software that was on the desktop, and see if there's even room on the craptop's drive for everything.

Suckage

Ten things I hate about this "temporary" laptop at work

1. There's apparently no way to keep it from hibernating if closed, so even though it's hooked up to an actual monitor, it has to sit open on the desk.

2. There's no docking station available for it

3. Apparently, there are no usb keyboards available anywhere in the company so I have to use the laptop's kb, which has some really odd key placments.

4. They keys on the keyboard are a translucent blue. They look like they should have led's below 'em to light them up, but they don't.

5. There are five of those web/hotkey buttons above they keyboard, but they don't do anything. There's also no utility to assign any functions to them.

5a. Which is just as well, since neither Programmer Guy nor I can figure out what 4 of the buttons would be used for. One has an envelope, so that'd be email. The others have little icons of a little Saturn planet, a staple with tv rabbit ears on top and an arrow pointing downward underneath, some kind of maximize icon? and a little satellite dish icon - possibly something to turn wireless on.

6. There's no built in wireless in the laptop, even though there's the little kb hotkey and an led with the same icon below the lcd.

7. The cooling fan sounds like the cd drive spinning up

8 There are buttons to play back cd's. Like the hotkeys, they do nothing and there's no way to assign 'em to anything.

9. The IT folk didn't actually wipe the drive and reinstall winxp on it after they got it back from the last user. It looks like they just deleted any files/folders they didn't recognize. I ran adaware and spybot s&d on it and found a whole pile of stuff, including GAIN (Gator)

10. Whoever had it before put a little metallic American flag sticker below the keyboard. Someone's picked at that a bit so a corner of it sticks up and into the heel of my left hand when I type. I can't get the stupid thing to lay flat. If I peel it off, there'll be a sticky spot there.

Man, this thing sucks.