Iphone and Laptop Fail solutions

It’s been a while since I blogged. I’ve taken a little time off from blogging, reading blogs, twitter and reading. I was running so hard, I think I got burned out. I took a break and did a bunch of other stuff, not I’m ready to jump back in again.

Well during my time off, my iphone died. Literally died. Couldn’t turn it on, even with it plugged in. It took me a few days but I was able to figure it out. I jailbroke my phone and updated my 3G iphone to iOS 4.0. Well that rendered my iphone 3G nearly useless. It was slow, applications kept quitting and I was ready to throw my iphone through a brick wall.

So I decided to go to T-Mobile and see the new Samsung Galaxy Vibrant Phone which is suppose to be a competitor of the iphone 4. Plus I was pissed that all my contacts was gone, everything that was on my phone that I didn’t backup was kaput. I hate AT&T and don’t want anything to do with them as long as I can help it, so buying an iphone 4 was out of the question. I demoed the phone and love, love,loved it. I was ready to make an impulse purchase until the T-Mobile girl told me I don’t qualify for the promotional price. They wanted to charge me 1 and a half times the price of the phone. She also said, if I waited a few months, I would be eligible. So I decided to wait.

But what to do with my iphone which was unusable. I found a site to help me downgrade my iphone to the 3.0 firmware. After two or three times, it worked and I now have a working iphone 3G.

After hours reinstalling my apps and music I was good to go.

Fast forward a week. I had installed Microsoft Office 2010 on my laptop. The trial was over and I didn’t purchase it so it stopped working. I try to uninstall the application…it won’t uninstall. I found a post on Microsoft’s website that told me how to uninstall manually. I did it, but it was still there. So I tried to uninstall by installing again…as was suggested. I did that. It tells you to restart computer for the changes to become effective….I restarted…Computer won’t start windows. The Blue Stop screen of death.

I’m freaking out now because I didn’t have a backup of my laptop and I’m thinking my eintire laptop was dead. Panic stricken I take to google and find out that I have to try and do a repair of windows xp. I need the installation disk (which I can’t find). 3 hours later I find the reinstallation disk. I follow the directions to get into the recovery manager console and run chkdsk -r. That’s the command for windows to repair your windows xp if it ever won’t boot. 2 hours later, I’m back up and running.

Time for backup. I use Amazon S3 for my backups and Dragon Disk on my Laptop for the backup. Granted it takes a long time especially when you have a bunch of stuff to backup.

Well my laptop and iphone was back up and running which was good. Until, I decided to try linux on my laptop. That’s for another time.

Links
DragonDisk-Windows program to backup to an Amazon s3 bucket
Amazon S3Samsung Vibrant Android Phone (T-Mobile)– really inexpensive online backup solution for all of your files.
iPhone Jailbreak– Use at own risk. Will void warranty on your iphone.
iphone Unlock-Use any GSM carrier with iphone. Phone needs to be jaikbroken first. Use Ultrasn0w.
Revert iphone 3g to 3.0 firware
Windows Recovery console– In case you don’t have the original disk.