Trying to resuscitate my PC

Before reinstalling from scratch and losing (or having to back up) all my programs and data, I tried to install Windows and drivers etc. on another hard drive first.

So I bought a 40 gig hard drive from eBay and played around -- without success, however.

Installing Windows would work fine (except for the very first time, where it didn't recognise the (wireless) keyboard any more once it had switched to booting from the hard drive, and so I couldn't enter my name and organisation, yet it wouldn't let me proceed without doing so), but then I couldn't access WLAN or the built-in TV tuner. Basically, those drivers on my driver CD that had setup programs seemed to work, but there were a couple that just had .sys and .dll and .inf files in the directory. Right-clicking the .inf file gave an option to "Install", but nothing appeared to happen.

So I thought, well, there are those strangely-named files in the "E:\Recover" directory; let's see whether we can use those. Apparently, they belong to a bundled version of PowerQuest Partition Image (or something like that) that will only run from booting the Tools and Drivers CD, not standalone. So I tried restoring the complete image; it warned twice that I'd lose all my data, but well, there wasn't any of my data on the new hard disk yet, so I told it to go ahead.

It stopped, whining about insufficient space. So I deleted the two partitions which contained the factory contents of D: and E: from the original hard drive (but were only about as big as I thought they needed to be to contain the data I did), and made one big partition. Still no dice. Perhaps some step decides it wants a drive as big as the one that's "supposed" to be in the machine, even if the data contained on the partition takes up less space.

Anyway, one last attempt went through the "install drivers only" option. That seemed to go all right, churning out driver after driver for about half an hour. The next time I looked, though, the system had restarted and appeared to be stuck on the Loading Windows screen (not the logo-on-black one but the later, logo-on-blue one).

I decided to give it some time, since the first step had taken quite a while, too, but after half an hour I "pulled the plug" and restarted. Loading went very quickly, but as soon as it got to the blue background, it stayed stuck in the same place.

My options, as I saw them, were basically to try to get the WLAN driver installed through phoning the hotline and asking for help, or to give the "restore back to factory layout" thingy another try with a sufficiently-large hard drive. I decided to go with the latter. I found a hard drive that looked as if it might even be exactly the same one as the one I had now (same manufacturer, same capacity, but slightly different name, differing in numbers after a decimal point, perhaps a minor firmware upgrade or something), which was even about 15 euros cheaper than most comparable-capacity hard drives, and order that. Along with some Cat5 cabling in case I can get connected to our Internet router via Ethernet, at least, even if I can't get WLAN to work. After all, the OS on the original hard drive will boot, though only through Last Known Good.

New mobile number

I have a new mobile number [friends-only] now. Maybe temporarily, maybe not -- that depends mostly on whether I'll be able to carry over my old number onto the new plan; when I last talked to the hotline, they said they were still negotiating various aspects of number portability.

Basically the idea is this. I previously had an e-plus SIM card, mostly because most of my family had one, too. Now Alice, who already supply us with telephone and ADSL service, launched a new option at the beginning of May called "Option Mobile". Basically, calls from any Alice number (landline or mobile) to any other Alice number (landline or mobile) are free. They send you a new SIM card with a new phone number which is then, of course, an Alice mobile number.

This means that Stella and I will be able to talk to each other for free, e.g. when I'm in Wolfsburg, which is pretty neat.

And another neat thing about this plan is: no monthly fee, now minimum charge, and no 24-month contract term! Just the usual four-weeks-to-the-end-of-a-month that made Alice so attractive to us in the first place. (Things are different if you want a subsidised mobile phone along with the SIM card, but since I already have a phone, we get the good conditions.)

The new number is a bit of an inconvenience, but since I get nearly no calls on my mobile except from Stella, it's a fairly minor annoyance. (Having to key in my address book again will be annoying, as well.)

Maybe they'll let me take over my old phone number later on; combining a number people know with a plan that's more advantageous for Stella and me would be the best.

I asked whether they could send another SIM card for Stella as well, so that we could talk for free when she's away from home but has her mobile with her, and the hotline said that eventually, they planned to offer up to five (I think it was) SIM cards per contract, but since they were just getting underway, they only offered one SIM card per contract right now. So we'll wait. (But she doesn't have her mobile with her that much anyway.)

Since the new SIM card isn't pay-as-you-go but connected to a contract, I wonder whether there'll be an SMS-to-email gateway.

e-plus charges for each email received by their gateway that they forward to you as an SMS, so they only offer this for people with contracts (where they know they can bill them for the service, I suppose, as opposed to a PAYG account which might be empty); if things are the same here, I'll be able to accept incoming emails as SMS messages, e.g. via the LiveJournal interface, which could be interesting.

Outgoing SMS being converted to email would be interesting, too -- e-plus offers that even for PAYG, though I don't think I've used it so far.

I asked the Alice hotline about those services but the lady I reached was clueless in that regard -- when she heard "email" and "mobile phone", she said that whether the phone can send email depends on the phone model, and I had to explain to her that I wasn't talking about "native" email via Internet, but an SMS-to-email gateway, for phones that can only send SMS but can't speak SMTP or compose real emails. She tried to ask someone and get back to me, but since queues were too long, she suggested I call back. I decided to use their funny web form instead. Let's see what will transpire.