Question for Pam

[Mark]

This may be a moot point as the laptop has died,  will not even boot from CD, says registry error.  On that I am going to wipe the HDD and try to start over.  If you would like to make suggestions on that feel free to.  Now, on to my original question.  In Vista, Home edition, is there any way to turn the built in keyboard off?  It was rendered less than useless in the great cat puke disaster of last month.  Keys will for no apparent reason just activate.  I do not want to take the thing apart and physically detach the key board, but I will if I have to.

[SimplyPam]

I believe that you can disable it in the bios, Mark depends on what bios you have. Just watch for the prompts to press a key to enter setup.

I've known non-geek women who have changed a laptop keyboard so it's an option too. 

My best feat so far was a parallel install on Win XP after a really bad Windows update. I got back in and was able to backup my pictures. I bet you could do the same thing on Vista, never been through a Vista install. You just don't format and change the root directory name (Windows 2 or something else rather than the default of Windows or WINNT) so you don't overwrite your data.

Best of luck man  I know you can do it!

[Mark]

I can't get in far enough to change anything.  I got everything important off a couple of months ago when it started getting flaky, so an overwrite and reinstall is no big deal.  I'll poke around in the bios when I get that done.

[Sean Qendra]

Sledgehammers work wonders

[Fuzzy]

Especially when you're cracking nuts.

[Sean Qendra]

Buy a netbook.  They never go bad, they never screw up, they never fail and y'wanna know why?  Because you want them to...you want every damn reason to get rid of the foolish things and to go back to a REAL laptop, but they won't die and won't give you the reason to say "Hey boss, the net book died, I need to replace it".

When I first started DJ'ing, I ran my software on a netbook and it's like "what song was that??? Let me get my magnifying glass out so I can see what the damn text says."

[SimplyPam]

The bios (Setup) should be available before you get into Windows, on the black screen right after you power up.    Do you have the option to upgrade to Windows 7? At work, we are going from XP Pro right to Win7, it's much more stable than Vista.

Bill, I have to wear maximum magnification glasses to see a full sized monitor. I couldn't even consider a netbook 

[Fuzzy]

I'm not even going to pretend that I understand this thread or many of the terms used in it. One of the things that caught my eye though was that Pam mentioned Windows 7.

I've seen some adverts on the TV about W7, what is it, and is it worth upgrading to it?

[Sean Qendra]

From what I've seen with the customers who have it, wait awhile.  It's good, but they're still working out bugs - particularly some programs that just don't want to run on it.

[Fuzzy]

OK... I'll wait.

[Mark]

The bios (Setup) should be available before you get into Windows, on the black screen right after you power up.    Do you have the option to upgrade to Windows 7? At work, we are going from XP Pro right to Win7, it's much more stable than Vista.

It took 3 tries but I finally got into bios.  It just wouldn't take.  Nothing on the keyboard there.  I think if I can get Vista to reload successfully, and get whatever hardware issues worked out, I will wipe it and load Linux.

[Mark]

Huuumpf.   Looks like the HDD is just plain shot. 

[Sean Qendra]

Ubuntu is good for people who don't have to interface to the MS world and are willing to relearn operating systems

[SimplyPam]

I was afraid that it might be a hard drive issue or even the motherboard since you couldn't boot from a CD  


Fuzzy, Windows 7 is just the newest Windows operating system, like Windows XP but newer. 

[Fuzzy]

Gotcha Pam... But does newer mean better?