My brother ordered a new laptop before heading off to
college, and rather than take it out of the box and configure it myself like I
usually do (because it saves me hours of questions and lots of “Can you explain
what Feature X does”), I instead deferred the task onto him, figuring a
college-bound honor student would be able to make sense of turning it on and
getting it running with the software he uses. Oops.
The day it arrived, I hauled the box upstairs to his room
for him to find when he got home. When he got back, I heard the expected “Sweet!
It’s finally here!” Approximately twenty minutes later, I hear a knock on my
door, and open it to a rather bewildered expression plastered across my brother’s
face.
“My computer won’t start.”
<o:p></o:p>I found this odd, but figuring that it was a DOA piece of hardware, I shuffled
down the hallway into his room, where the laptop in question was sitting on the
floor, all manners of papers, plastic packaging, and more or less every game CD
he owned spread out around the room. I pressed the power button, and was
greeted with an error message that basically came down to a device driver
conflict. Puzzled at how a faulty device driver would escape a factory installation,
I asked him what he was doing when it stopped working.
<o:p></o:p>“Well…I installed (insert name of some ancient Virtual CD
Drive program here), and it said I had to reboot the system. It never came back
up again.”
<o:p></o:p>I was stunned. He had this thing out of the box for not even
twenty minutes, and it was now in an unbootable state. I've committed some pretty impressive screw-ups in my day (for example, going through and deleting all the msvcrt files back when my parents got their first Windows 95 machine to "save space"), but this was unparalleled in my memory.
Next time, I’ll set it up myself. It’ll save me the two hours of profanities and dirty looks to get the
machine back up and running again.<o:p></o:p>