Why has it been a couple weeks since Ephman's blogged about anything?  Because, his system was totally trashed!  It's been a total nightmare.  Right from the start things didn't look good on restoring his box.  But here's a little history all to put it into context for you.

Ephman runs not only bleeding edge software, but his notebook is a total beast.  And he likes it that way.  The notebook is an Asus M70vn.  Won't get too much into the specs, but put it this way, the thing has 2 hard drives, and an HDTV tuner it with an 17" 1080p screen.  Nice.  And that's where all the trouble began.

He runs two operating systems (techically 3 but let's just leave the Vmware alone for now).  Microsoft Vista, for gaming , managing his crappy iPhone, and the HDTV for football (when his wife is downstairs watching her girlie HBO shows).  His main operating system that he does everything on is Ubutnu Linux.  He loves loves loves Linux because of he just make his computer work the way he works.  He's been running Ubuntu for 4.5 years now and never has there been ever a serious issue. Plus it's nice that all the software is free, and he never worries about virus's and crap like that.

So about 2 months ago he figured he'd got and upgrade the HDTV driver in Vista.  Bad idea.  It stopped working and since he can't stand Vista, and trying to figure out the bugs all in the thing and ways around, he'd just reinstall the operating system one day.  Well that one day came along.  So he pulled out what he thought was his Linux drive, and reinstalled Vista.  DAMN!  That was my Ubuntu Linux drive.  Ok so no problem, just restore from my backup.  No worries right?  But as a good friend says:

"You have to spend at least $500k on backup hardware and even then it's still labeled "backup" not "restore". - Sam

AAARRRRGGGGG my backup didn't restore!  And all my linux life was gone.  Gone forever.  For a backup solution PING used to be so reliable.  Ephman even tried using TestDisk to see if anything was salvagable.  Nada.  So now Ephman needed to restore not only his crappy Microsoft Vista, but also his beloved Ubuntu Linux.

So after all that was up and going, which too HOURS!  He thought what a great idea it would be to run the latest nVidia Linux driver for his video card.  So things would look all pretty and 3d while running Compiz.  In theory that was a great idea.  Installing the driver went really smooth, eventhough it takes like 20 minutes and has a 100 different steps.  Reboot time (which is rare in Linux).  And nothing.  Well ok he had about 5 minutes of use and then his Ubuntu would crash.  Screen goes all crazy like.  Hmmm....  What the fudge was that?  He booted up into Vista, put the latest driver in, and same thing in Vista.  So in Linux it's easy to uninstall anything if you know the command line, not so in Vista.  At the end of the day, Ephman called up Asus technical support and now has to ship his machine back to them to get it repaired. 

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