Acer Aspireone woes update

And wouldn't you know it, the awesome reinstall Windoze partition that the lovely Acer people put on my netbook doesn't actually do anything to the MBR Systemreserved partition. Like restore it! Or anything! So I've now reinstalled over my fully updated and OEM bloatware stripped copy of Windoze with the horrible default install and my netbook still won't boot into the Windoze partition. Maybe I'll just nuke whole hard drive, repartition and just use Ubuntu. Back to a single OS. Unbelievable. Well, not unbelievable really. I suppose it would be too much to ask to actually have some helpful options in there, like a command line/dos prompt option. *sighs*

Final update in the ongoing saga of the netbook:

20 April. It's stormy in my head! When will the voices of the dead  files leave me alone?

Well, things turned out good with the netbook in the end! Went to find myself a windoze 7 starter .iso, managed to also find some instructions on how to make my usb flashdrive bootable in XP and nuked the whole damn netbook! I'm even making this entry on it. It's got Ubuntu and windoze 7 on it and I won't ever put Android near it again. Not that it was really the Android distros fault I suppose, I should have read more carefully that they didn't bother to get GRUB to actually look for any other partitions when installing the damn thing.

To add a final note of happiness, the raw, non-Acer OEM install of windoze 7 starter is way better anyways!!! Only 35 processes, even after I added avast and malaware. The old, horrible Acer OEM version of windoze 7 had 69 processes!!! And that was after I stripped all the bloatware out I could find and used autoruns to ruthlessly purge all useless startup crap. Given the fact that the Acer recovery utility turned out to be totally useless, I also got rid of its partition and now have 15 gig or so of extra space. Nice.

Lesson: OEM bloatware installs of windoze really, really suck. Even more than I initially thought! Despite the pain of this lesson, I'm glad I went through it and have a nicer, cleaer install of windoze.

Lesson 2: Be careful what partition you're over-writing with GRUB! Fixing a windoze MBR on a laptop is much harder than I thought it would be. Sometimes staring all over again and reinstalling is just easier...