"I brought it home, plugged it into my stuff and turned it on. I got a prompt about configuring RAID, which puzzled me greatly since there’s only one hard drive in there and no mention was made of RAID anywhere on the box. It passed, though, and the machine settled into a state of utter stillness, showing nothing but a blinking cursor. I let it stay like that a while. In addition to my willingness to explore computing alternatives, I pride myself on my patience.
"Eventually I realized it wasn't going to do anything, so my diagnostic thinking engaged. I realized that I had casually hung a seven-port USB hub off of it, so I powered the machine down, unplugged the hub and plugged in the Gateway-issued keyboard and mouse (which are atrocious, and which use the old PS/2 connectors).
"Sure enough, it must have hated something on the hub and once I got past the invitation to configure the non-existent RAID array it began to boot into Vista."
