You will need the following tools:

1. A week-old laptop, present from relatives preferred
2. Um...that's it

Note: no brain is required for the purposes of this tutorial.

Method:

1. Make sure you have finally finished customising and configuring your new laptop after having spent the last week getting lost in its preinstalled Windows Vista.
2. Decide to be geeky and install a second Operating System. You have done this before (it was a fluke, but no one has to know that) so this should be no problem at all.
3. Run through installation of said Operating System, making sure not to miss the part about partitioning the hard drive.
4. Yay, new OS installed. Reboot! Windows will then say it cannot run.
5. Realise you have completely messed up the partitioning and therefore have chopped Windows in half. Rectify this mistake by simply deleting and reformatting the partitions of the hard drive that you want back.
6. Reboot! Your computer should now display a lovely error message saying the boot partition is corrupted or similar. Congratulations, you have now completed this tutorial.

Oh yes, that was me yesterday. I've had this laptop a week and I've broken it already. Luckily I was able to repair most of the damage without reinstalling everything (yay rescue disk) but some things (e.g. wireless) are still broken :( Blah.

I appear to have had a birthday today... And with it, came a brand new shiny laptop! :D My four-year-old one was really starting to give up (especially the screen) so I thought it was about time it was replaced. I now have a Toshiba Equium Dual Core 1.73GHz/2GB RAM/120GB HDD/15.4" widescreen/Windows Vista laptop. Its brightness makes me realise just how bad the screen from the last one was getting... I had both laptops on next to each other and it seemed like the old one wasn't even on.

I also got a digital photoframe from the boyfriend :D It's brilliant! You put in a memory card and it'll do a slideshow of the pictures. It'll also do alarm clocks and stuff but I'm not really interested in that... The fact that I can have a picture frame that changes its photo whenever I want (it even has a remote control for that XD ) is enough to keep me entertained for ages :D :D :D

Anyway, back to the laptop... Ooooooooh it's nice. The fact that it goes higher than 1024×768 is great - my photos fit on my screen now :P But like I said, it has Windows Vista on it. URGH. If I had an XP disk I'd install that on there - Vista is really quite rubbish. Ok so it looks shiny, but I can't find anything in it and most stuff that was simple in XP and prior is stupidly difficult in Vista. GAH. The fact that I can't change the colour of the taskbar is very annoying, as is the lack of themes and customisations. I don't want a black taskbar, I don't want weird blue-ish/transparent windows with huge borders, I want my own theme kthx. >:(

Apart from that, it's wonderful and I love it lots. <3<3<3<3 :D

Next time you freak out about there being dust in your computer, do not attempt to take it apart because you will break it.

...this stems from me being a complete clean freak as far as my laptop is concerned. I take it apart regularly and clean the fan and all the other random bits and pieces. The only part I'd never done was the heatsink (the bit that cools the processor). In removing the heatsink, I managed to tear out the processor (which was not supposed to come out - it was locked into the motherboard with a switch that was accessible after the heatsink and cooling system was removed) because it was stuck to the heatsink with some heatsink paste (stuff meant to help cool everything down, not meant to stick).

Two hours later, I had a dead computer and a processor which would not go back into place because half of its pins were bent (due to aforementioned wrenching). I managed to eventually get them straightened out and separate the heatsink from the processor in order to put everything back together, but my poor laptop still wouldn't work :( I prodded it a bit and realised I'd put the fan back on upside down. Correcting this meant I had a working laptop once more.

Needless to say, I got laughed at by others who know far more about this sort of thing than I do. >.< ...I believe I have learned my lesson.

(Though having said that, I was very slightly hoping my computer had permanently died so I could get a new one :P )