Failure Extravaganza.

So it's Memorial Day weekend a time to remember all those who have fallen in service of our country. Indeed they deserve more than a long weekend and exceptional deals on a new car but it's America baby. Still a moment of silence feels appropriate, please stop reading for 2 minutes.

OK, now that's out of the way. My Memorial Day weekend is one I will never forget, I finally decided to install Windows 7 RC1 on my primary desktop PC. I was originally avoiding this task since I figured I would have to kill my Vista partition, split the drive and install both Vista and 7. I have a very old motherboard and drivers for Vista were not easy to come by. All of my anxieties were relieved when I learned of the "Shrink Partition" command built into Vista's storage management. This nifty little right-click option allows you shrink a partition to a desired size limited only by the free space and the number of fucking-unmovable system volume information files you have.

See this would have been really fucking simple except I've had the hard drive almost completely full so I have unmovable sector blocks scattered all over hell, including the end of the partition. So the fancy ass shrink volume fuck you option only netted me 7GB of a possible 70GB. All that only after a defragged and killed off anything that might be immovable (hibernate.sys, pagefile.sys). Was all that bullshit enough fuck no. Self important Windows 7 needs 16GB of space to stretch out and enjoy itself with. Are you fucking kidding 16GB?

I poked around the intertubes and found GParted Live CD which would allow me to shrink the partition with only a small amount of semi-permanent damage. Of course the first ISO of GParted Live I burnt to a disk wouldn't boot, causing me to try PartedMagic which also didn't boot. Eventually I downloaded another copy of GParted Live, burnt it, and it worked fine. Actually its a really sweet partitioning program. I was able to shrink 140GB down to 70GB and move it to the end of the drive. All from a GUI. However, because Windows is fucking awesome you need to have an install disk handy to repair the master boot record. Which I had and which I did.

After all this hoop-la I finally get Windows 7 installed. Guess what it's fucking boring. It looks mostly like Vista, actually Vista looked cooler. The user interface is a bit better and shit runs faster. My desktop still sucks though, it's old and always will but at least now it's cutting edge suck. Not the kind of suck you mother pulls out.

Now for the meaty part of the story. I'm having such a jolly good time with 7 on my desktop I decided I should do the exact same thing to older ass Presario laptop. However there is an extra catch. The entire hard drive is encrypted so I have to undo that before I can start dicking around with the partition spacing. OK, no problem Truecrypt does this on the fly from Windows XP. I fire up the full decryption and viola in 8hrs I can start installing. With about 20% remaining the fucking power goes out in the entire fucking county.

We actually heard the tell tale explosion from the substation near our apartment. Now you're probably thinking "K it's a laptop with a battery and Truecrypt was written by pros who keep this shit in mind." And you would be totally correct except this laptop is old like 1999-2000. When I got around to checking on it, the battery last ~15 minutes, I saw the extra awesome balloon tip "write error ... corrupt ... bullshit." So while this might be unrelated to the power outage it still happened. I deferred the decryption and shut the laptop down.

Without a power my fiancee and I started to party like it was 1780. Scrabble by candle light, I lost by 60 points. I had a Q, X, and, Z. Losing with those is an embarrassment according to Scrabble savants. I was also in the process of making dinner when the power when out so we were getting a bit hungry. We found some flashlights, then found some fresh batteries and made our way to the car. When our sole mode of transportation roared to life we noticed the roar was a bit off. This noise continued until we left the parking lot when it suddenly "broke loose". We opted to turn the car around, since it was still running, and inspect the engine compartment. There were no warning lights on so that was promising. When I popped the hood open I immediately noticed the source of the disturbance. The serpentine belt for the A/C unit was loosely flailing round. We shut the engine down and tried to slip it back into place, fail. I then tried to removed it, also fail. Of course there was another belt in the way. We gave up and returned to the apartment. As a point of interest, the serpentine belts were just replaced a few weeks go, along with a new timing belt and water pump (which were also improperly replaced ~1 year by a different mechanic). We're looking to purchase a newer car and I would like all of the mechanical connection to be chain or gear drive I'm tired of fucking belts.

Eventually the power returned and I got back to decrypting my laptop. Well tried to, it wouldn't boot into Windows XP. Being as the last error I saw involved hard drive corruption I tossed in SpinRite and put it to work recovering sectors. As of right now its 2.29% done with 644hrs remaining and has already found 7 unrecoverable sectors. I'm going to let it keep going since I'm not sure what else to do.

My score for this weekend. Up one new operating system. Down one car, down one laptop, lost at Scrabble to a girl.

Does anyone have any opinions on an Infinity G35x, BMW 325xi, Honda Accord, Subaru Outback Coupe or Chevy Malibu?

What about netbook like laptops? I'm leaning toward an Ideapad S12 with the Ion chip but maybe an HP 12" or Dell 12".