Ezel Ezel and Ezel. That’s the way to describe ol’ me. I have just recovered from a serious problem, thrust upon me, by yours truly. ARGH, what a pain in the proverbial behind – the IBM Optical drive, I Hate Thee. Yep now you know why this is categorized as a rant.

The whole saga started with my wanting to uninstall Vista after just two days of jousting with it. The “System” process had the CPU spiking 50% and never did the usage go down once below 30%. I thought it was due to Network Discovery Processes in the background. Really had to disable them all, and yet still the performance was b0rky. The inevitable decision (and sorry if ya break out with a sigh), go back to XP.

Argh, grmph. Doing the thing that I hate best, reinstalling Windows. But anyway, back home, I dug out my CDR and deleted the Partition, and the CD started to copy those ubiquituous files onto the Drive. But what’s this? It got stuck at 11% with drivers.cab! Oh no, I exclaimed, I had to get the laptop ready for next morning. But this basically meant, I had to dig out another working XP CD. Which was tough enough a challenge in itself, owing to the fact that I have some 800-900 CDs/DVDs all over the place. Finally found one that was in a relative pristine condition, popped it in, and same error on another file. Ah, could it be the extry RAM I installed? I dug the RAM out, and tried again. No effect. The DVD RAM drive is well and truly b0rk3d.