Itching Fingers & A Laptop

I was known to have patience when fixing PCs for friends or anyone I knew. Few days ago I was ‘assigned’ to fix a Windows fault in a colleague’s Acer laptop. As always, I will treat the fault with SOP; diagnose problem, reinstall Windows or fiddle with its Recovery. Worst case scenario – format and clean install. Simple task, no problems at all. In no time in less than 5 hours, I got the problem fixed.

The fault was initially caused by BitLord (he claimed, but I doubt it). Therefore, a BSOD was generated after he shut down his laptop. Unbeknownst to me, that was actually untrue as a standard BSOD will tell you conflicts related to memory, corrupt system files or something that dealt with hardware. His claim was far-fetched but I decline to blame him as he wasn’t IT literate guy (he can’t even tell which is an XP CD and which is not!).

It turn out that the BSOD was generated as a result of a corrupted window file called pagesys.sys. This tweak was easy, as I recovered the OS simply by shoving in a set of his 7-piece eRecovery discs. After the process ended, his Windows resurfaced again and returned back to normal. All this process was done with full of ease; no tension no anger.

Then in less than 48 hours, he returned the machine to me telling me that it failed to start again. I asked him the recovery was smooth, how come the machine failed again? He told me he wanted to retrieve his laptop admin panels as he assumed that when I performed the recovery, it did not recover them. I told him that he had misunderstood. The programs were actually there, is just that the shortcuts on the desktop was missing; all he have to do is just make new ones! He was gob smacked; obviously of his stupidity.

So I asked, ‘what have you done that another BSOD appeared?’. He told me he was installing them from the recovery disc. I was stoned. I asked, ‘did you continue with the rest of the discs?’ He said ‘ NO’. I slapped by forehead.

And now you know where the trouble is. Having installed 1 out of 7 and not continuing the rest was simply a bad move. The worst thing is, I have to perform a clean installation and partitioning. His recovery disc doesn’t offer much of a help this time as his Media Centre XP is not compatible with my home-made slipstreamed XP Pro SP2. Surprisingly, the basic SP1 that I have performed earlier doesn’t help at all. It keep generating BSOD errors stating pci.sys was missing.

Therefore, all the recovered software’s in his Media Center XP cannot be used even my XP Pro had overwritten his Media Center XP. All of them end up as junk files. So, I have to end up installing each component manually; from drivers to his bundled software which was tedious!

Well, that was a price to pay for itching fingers. A lesson to the mediocre; please appreciate any free repairs that your friend done for you! And always check laptop reviews before you buy one.