Hope your 2006 holiday season is going well. One of the things I’ve been working on, with limited success, is pictured above: trying to do a full restore on my son’s Gateway laptop and the process hangs before installing all the applications from the recovery partition. He’s bummed out that his newer laptop hasn’t been working very well. I’ve also tried doing a full restore including the recovery partition.

The Gateway laptop has Windows Media Center 2005 and I was able to cobble together a working install that would do everything but play DVDs (decoder problems), but the partition was all screwed up and decided to start completely over to try to return to factory condition (mistake thus far, it seems). Now I have the partition setup correctly, but it won’t install all the 81 programs (most of which I’ll be removing for him as soon as the program loads). I can kill some of the apps that hang with the Task Manager but the whole process bombs after a forced reboot around the installation of program #35 of 81.

This wasn’t a Christmas present, BTW, it was the one purchased for $479 from Best Buy back in August. We didn’t do the smart thing and backup the recovery disks so I needed to pay Gateway $20 to send the CD. They don’t offer downloads — a major strike against any computer manufacturer in my book — for all the necessary drivers for their computers. This is 2006, not 1996.

Perhaps this is the revenge for buying a cheaper laptop, but it worked good for a couple months. Then it went blue screen of death and Windows would not start. I’d hook him up with Linux if only for the fact that he wants to run the Zune software (Windows only).

Any full restore experts in the house?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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