Seven hours on the phone...

I am now just about best of friends with Mike at HP support in India! Gads! I got my laptop early this afternoon, got it all unpacked and fumbled through putting the battery in and trying to figure out how to even get it open. Geez, I've been on computers so long, and I felt totally foreign to it. But I prevailed and hooked it up to dial up and AOL running enough to get it registered, Then proceeded to unpack the router and start the process of trying to get online.

Well, it didn't work. So, I unplugged everything and put it on the PC, and it didn't work. Over and over, trying this and that, called HP, first call was a long time, doing all these things they tell you to do; last step was to put it through a check that took 20 minutes for the computer to go through. So, we hung up; and I called back when it finished. I got Mike back. Now, let me tell you, I'll bet you any amount of money "Mike" is NOT his real name. His English wasn't too bad if he would speak slowly. And his understanding was a little rough around the edges. I had to repeat my phone number at least four times, and each time, he would get a number wrong. That was before we ever got started. But, all in all, he was patient, and I was, too - at least outwardly. I got sooo tired and disgusted. I did so many restarts, I told him the next thing they would have to do is replace my restart button. At one point I even called John and he tried to walk me through a few steps -- same ones Mike had done, too; but just in case. John didn't know what to think about it.

Bottom line, I can get on the Internet with the cable modem plugged straight into the laptop; but not through the router. He had me disable Norton's firewall and even uninstall the virus protect; built new winstocks -- oh, lord, I don't know what all. I asked him to send me all that we did in an email. He said he would. I hope he keeps his word. Anyway, now I have to get Road Runner out here to see if it's something in their configuration -- which will be Monday. If not, then the only thing left is to do a whole hard drive recovery. For joy, for joy!! So, what really sucks about that is there's no point to start moving into it if there's such a real possibility of having to do a recovery anyway. Why me!!!

I even missed all my news shows. But at least they rerun them all night; and I doubt I'll be able to sleep anyway.