New Computer

posted to Return of the Joke by Bobby (3:07 a.m., July 1, 2009)

While this has nothing to do with the comic, I felt the need to share the information.  Over the weekend I sold my desktop of two years and bought a shiny new laptop.  It outperforms my desktop by a landslide, but there's a catch, well two if you include Vista...

Partitioned Hard Drive.

For those of you who don't know what that means, here's an example.  Say you have a piece of toast. Golden brown, crisp enough to spread cold butter on, yet soft enough that half of it doesn't explode when you take that first bite.  Now take that piece of toast and break it in half.  Hooray! You just doubled the number of toast pieces you have!  They both serve the same purpose, but half the size of the original piece.  So back to computer terms, I have one hard drive, but it's "partitioned" into two separate ones, so each "partition" is a stand alone drive when viewed using a Graphic User Interface.

Now, I understand the benefit of having a partitioned hard drive.  You can back up your data or have multiple operating systems installed that don't conflict with each other.  But for me, I only want one operating system.  After importing all my music, movies, pictures, and installed a COUPLE games, the C drive is full (250GB HDD split into two ~100GB drives).  Some of these programs are not fully updated, and since there's no room on the drive, there's nothing I can do.  I have two options: format the HD and reinstall the OS (which I can't because I don't have the install CD, and Microsoft isn't smart enough to include software to burn ISO files to disks), or deal with the partitioned drives.  The laptop arrived at 2:30pm on Tuesday.  It is now 3am and I'm still working on spreading out my data between drives.  I have another 16 minutes to go with my movies and another 2 hours and 15 minutes with my music.  It's going to be great when I boot up iTunes and it says that all my music vanished.

If this doesn't work out the way I want, then I'll prolly spend the next two days Download, burning, and installing Windows 7, and putting all my data onto the computer again.

So in the future, if you find yourself purchasing a computer with a partitioned hard drive, save yourself 12 hours of frustration and just format the hard drive and reinstall the OS immediately.  Trust me.

I know now what I knew then, but I didn't know then what I know now.