My poorly laptop…

…in fact, I think it’s more than poorly.

It was a freebie that I got with a mobile broadband deal, before they started giving away netbooks.  It’s installed with Windows Vista Basic (whoopee…) and I’ve been dual-booting with Ubuntu (with a brief dalliance with PCLinuxOS, which refused to recognise my network card).

Anyways, I’ve been buying Linux Format magazine recently and t’other month, they gave away Linux Mint on their cover DVD, which seems pretty good.  So, I decided to give it a go and install it, at the same time overwriting both my Ubuntu and Vista partitions (I don’t hate Vista as others do, but I’m not sure it’s suited to a 2ghz Celeron laptop).

It all seemed to go well at the start, but something went wrong.  I don’t know if the DVD was dicky or if my crashing into the laptop (I’d left on the floor) didn’t help, but either way it didn’t install properly.  After a while, it just sat there with the hard disk light on and the DVD clicking in the drive.  I tried rebooting (which I had to do by taking the battery out and putting it back in) and nothing.  Nada.

So, I have killed my laptop!  I hope that I’ll still be able to boot from a live CD/DVD of a distro (whether Mint or another one – haven’t decided yet) and resurrect it from there.  If not, then it’s either new hard drive for the laptop, or since my mobile broadband contract’s nearly up, see if I can get a better one on a new contract (shouldn’t be hard…).

Isn’t that a pip!