listersgirl | (no subject)

Oh look, I'm going to rant about computers again! Lucky you.

My new harddrive arrived yesterday, and I managed to install it with no problems. And then I had to install Windows. Which took forever, but finally did install. Except. All sorts of little things are weird. Most importantly, my screen resolution is wack, and I only have two options, neither of which fit a wide screen laptop. If anyone has a widescreen laptop (mine is a Compaq), what is your resolution set to? Because I think it would help if I could say, hey, where's this option. Also, scrolling of any sort is totally jumpy. And I don't have any options for standby or hibernate. It feels like there's piles of stuff missing from the programs menu, too, and I'm not talking about things that I downloaded. Just...stuff. Like the program that allows me to burn DVDs, which was there when I bought the computer.

Basically everything is weird and wrong, which is very irritating. I would be happy, though, if I could at least get the screen resolution fixed, so that everything would stop being oddly stretched.

Don't worry, I'm not asking for advice or help here - I am planning on spending another exciting Friday night on the phone with the support centre, seeing if they can do anything at all for me. But I really just needed to vent. Someone once said to me that they thought no-one should be allowed to own a computer if they couldn't fix it themselves, and I'm really starting to feel like I should just chuck mine and live without it, because it's just so much effort sometimes, especially considering I don't use it for anything complicated. Yargh.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The basic windows installation disk doesn't have any of the hardware-specific drivers for your laptop. You should have gotten a disk or two of those from the vendor--Dell? bless your heart. I feel your pain.

Fuss at them mightily. Demand that they restore the laptop to the state it was in when they originally shipped it. /voice of experience

AHA. Okay, that makes sense. I'll have to see if I have any of those, and if not, well, I can fuss with the best of 'em.

Bah and aaaargh!

I think

maitheas has hit the nail on the head: both things like the display drivers and also things like the program for burning DVDs would have been in addition to your Windows disk, hopefully in the original shipment of the computer.

I can't really agree with the thing about owning a computer: I wouldn't be able to fix my microwave, but that doesn't make me unsuitable to own one. But I think we should be able to expect that, when someone claims that they're going to provide support, they *will*. Just shipping you a hard disk wasn't exactly overwhelming on the support front...

Good luck!

If you don't have driver disks, you can probably download drivers/software from the site of the DVD-drive manufacturer. Other programs I'm not sure about, but that one's a good bet. Um. I think.

I agree that they should have sent you a HDD with a basic Compaq image on it for your model, because that would not have killed them. Boo to them. Boo to the whole thing!

I see you've got others offering info, but if it's of any help to you I'm typing this on my widescreen Compaq laptop and it's at 1280x800 pixels.

Thanks! As it turned out,

maitheas was right, and there was another disc that no-one at Compaq bothered to tell me I needed to install, and it had all the drivers and specifications. So I am fixed up.