Slow Blogging again today

The last couple of weeks I've been fighting the "Battle of the Hard Drive" - my external drive, on which most of my web creation and graphic software (among other things) were stored, died a few weeks back, so I ordered a new one, and thus began an odessy through the new economy version of customer service and warranty programs.

The first drive I got corrupted all the data I put on it, so I had to return it. The retailer I got it from wouldn't let me return it to them, so I had to work with the manufacturer's return policy, which resulted in a bunch of running around (done by a friend of mine, since I can't do it myself) to get the drive properly packaged. I send it off, wait 2 weeks, and get the replacement. It doesn't work either.

Now, I try to be as patient as I can, but there are times that can be very difficult. This was one of those. I ended up going through 3 customer service reps, a supervisor and a manager trying to get them to understand that all I wanted at this point was a refund, which the manufacturer says they never give under any circumstances. Finally, the manager offered me a much better replacement drive - with almost 3 times the capacity of the one I'd bought. I relented, and asked if they could just get it sent to me as soon as possible. Amazingly, this one only took 2 days to arrive.

So, I spent all last night getting it installed, partitioned and formatted, organized and reinstalled all my files, and somehow, in the process, lost my ability to connect to the Internet.

After exhausting every option I could think of for getting it reset, I found the only soloution was to reinstall Windows XP. That meant activating it. Hoo Boy! That was a treat. Since I couldn't connect to the internet, I had to do it by phone. I must say, they managed to make their computerized customer service rep sound reasonably realistic, but it's still a bit of a chore!

At any rate, I'm finally connecting to the net again(Yippee!), and will be posting more tomorrow. Right now, I need to play some games :)