cimorene

so we installed winxp on my computer. the gateway website SAID that xp was one of the available upgrades, so we did it without leaving a backup copy of me, which has been seriously fucking up my computer for far too long now, and was going to take up too much of the far too little space in my hard disk. then it turned out that the modem driver wasn't compatible. windows thinks that my computer does not *have* a modem, which means i can't use dial-up internet. with my laptop, that is; there's still this ~~trusty~~ old dinosaur.

at any rate, we spent hours, and

guinevere33, who deserves endless praise and acclaim, spent nearly all day, downloading drivers and doing battle with the gateway website, where tech support informed her that the claim my computer could upgrade to xp was a "marketing thing, not a tech support thing." so yeah. we tried a dell driver and a bunch of gateway/win2000 drivers, and none of them would work. backup plan was to install win2000, but it wouldn't install on top of xp because it's older, and xp wouldn't delete because there wasn't another version of windows installed.

my only alternatives now are to get a cable modem when we get back from out of town, or replace my modem, or wipe the hard drive and install win2000 from scratch. the former is the best plan, and my mom, who has a narrow but noteworthy nasty streak, is pissed at comcast and therefore prepared to do the "free 2 month trial" of cable internet for me and then cancel it when i go back to school in the fall.