Technical nightmare

It all began on friday morning.. The MSN for-some-god-knows-reason fail to start at all on the laptop.. All attempts such as re-install, downgrade to MSN 7.5, restore to older system restore point all failed.. So it's time for the long awaited format of the laptop. Well this HP laptop is very new and was preloaded with a lot of redundant stuff.. The 10GB of harddisk containing the recovery and other "sponsor-ware" was terrible.. Can you imagine, a 80GB hdd laptop and i kept having "System on low memory..." AND.. mind u, i did not install or download any big big items so faar...

So it all seems like a sign to format the laptop finally after 3 months of purchase. We had created the 18CDs of recovery disc.. yes.. 18, as the laptop has no DVD burner.. So after backing up my stuff.. it's time the nightmare begins..

Part 1-------------------------------------------------------------
We loaded in the Media Centre 2005 OEM OS, and the familiar blue screen appears. and guess wat, it failed to detect any hdd.. HUH@#?!!?
We tried again, same error, but with the VISTA CD, it can detect the hdd..
So we called the hp support line who treated us like idots who dun know how to shut down the laptop. Argghh.. In the end, i found out, you need to disable SATA controller in BIOS before the format..

Part 2-------------------------------------------------------------
Time to load in the drivers.. HUH@??? No Lan? How to connect online to download drivers?
After many rounds of downloading and restarting the laptop, the LAN miraculously appeared.

Part 3-------------------------------------------------------------
Where's the sound? The.. Took another hour of wild-goose-chase and many installations to finally get it working. by now. we have already spent 9 hours on the laptop already..

If any HP guy is listening, i have a few advice for u:
1) I still love my recovery discs, pls dun eat my 10GB of hdd instead of disc
2) Ermm.. your call support definitely needs an upgrade. I dun need to spend 5min on call just to go thru step-by-step with you on how to shut down a laptop
3) Please have all the drivers on the same support page
4) Maybe a magical blue button "like the IBM ones", will be sweet. Just press to connect online for the drivers
5) HP is very good for non-techies. With the recovery disc, you can easily reload back factory default. ie. 40GB useable space from a 80GB hdd.

To date, this is my most painful computer reformat so far... Derrick didn't even have to sweat when he did Vista on the other computer =( but at least now i have more than 70GB of free space on the laptop.. Woohoo =P