Hi, I haven't been active on the forums lately, but now I'm back to tell you why! No, I'm not a forum skipping newb, I've just been packed with work lately. It all started about a week ago. My brand new Gateway Laptop game pre-installed with Windows Vista. Now Gateway gave me no recovery discs whatsoever. What they did, was create a recovery partition to reinstall Vista. Of course they gave me the option to create like, 30 restore CDs, but of course, I didn't. Well, I went to change my background, but came up with some random file missing error. Naturally, I thought, "It's Windows Vista! Just restart it!" Well, I restarted my computer, only this time, it failed to even boot Vista! Anyway, I was like, oh well, I'll just install Ubuntu and transfer all of my files too a separate partition. Well, I installed Ubuntu (which I luckily had created a boot disk one day earlier, along with Fedora) I transferred all of my files to a separate partition and downloaded and burned an ISO image for Windows Vista Recovery Center. Somehow, Windows Vista corrupted the GRUB bootloader (Ubuntu's) and failed to fix it's own so now, I couldn't even boot the recovery partition! I decided to give Fedora a try and booted from a live CD (this gives you the oppertunity to use the OS, without installing it onto your hard drive) I tried installing this over Ubuntu, but for some reason, it didn't work. At this point I was frustrated...very frustrated. I decided to just give up, format my entire drive, lose all of my files, but get my computer working. I tried...and failed. Fedora would just not format my drive and gave me the following error: "Your hard drive is failing! Your hard drive has detected bad sectors, please backup important info!" At this point, I facepalmed! I called Gateway and told them, they said my computer was in warranty and the only reason it did what it did was because I installed Ubuntu [...] Gateway's customer support wasn't much help! They told me I needed to purchase a 20$ recovery disk. I promptly told them to stick it up their money loving :lol: hole and GTFO my interwebz :maha: In the meantime, I thought I was screwed. I tried, however (for reasons unknown too me) to try and install Ubuntu once again. I did and it worked Not liking the change In OS, I decided to download Windows 7 RC and am now using it as my main OS (I know, I know, it's unstable.) Since I have a legal Windows Vista product key, I can legally torrent an uncracked copy of Windows Vista and use my key, which I'm in the process of doing. I will probably continue to use Windows 7 as my main OS but keep an installation of Vista on a separate partition, just in case. Anyway, I got that mess straightened out. But I completely forgot about something. I had three days until school started and I had a summer assignment (which I hadn't started.) The assignment was, read three novels: Brave New World, Lord of the Flies and Pride and Prejudice then type a minimum 2 page report on each one...and I only had three days!! I sustained myself on Coke and Monster and pulled three consecutive all nighters with 12 hours of sleep between the three days! I got it done though!