So my office gave me a Toshiba M200 Tablet PC, honestly I hate the thing. I think it’s a steaming pile of crap :0 It’s not a bad machine, except that I got it second hand and the guy who had it before me loaded it with all kinds of crap the weaseled their way into the registry and slowed the whole thing down to a crawl. Even worse is that he screwed up installations and lots of stuff just won’t go away.

I figured I’d re-install WindowsXP, but the dang thing refuses to boot off a CD-ROM. It has a USB CD-ROM and refuses to access it until after boot. I got a copy of SUSE Linux and thought maybe I’d try that, but of course since I can’t boot off a CD it’s a no go…

I’ve got an old Toshiba laptop that I’ve had for about 4 years. This thing has been a workhorse that served me well (after I put a fresh install of Windows XP on it that didn’t have Toshiba’s buggy and unstable utilities causing issues in the background), but since I got my new Compaq a few months ago the Toshiba was collecting dust (literally, it was pretty nasty!) I figured I’d try to put SUSE on it just for kicks, which would be well and good if I could have figured out how to get into the BIOS to change that boot order…

The normal suspects don’t work on Toshibas, and there’s NOTHING in the user manual about such things. (yes I actually looked at the manual!). It took a good hour of searching to find out that you can’t actually access the bios, instead you need to hit F12 and then select the preferred boot device. In reality it’s a slick system, provided there was SOME documentation that stated how this was supposed to work…