Update: I went to the Staples store where I bought my laptop and they said the hard drive simply stopped to function. Will take at least 7 openable days to repair, with a non-negligeable risk of data loss. So if you can see the BIOS booting and have a CD booting as well, but the BIOS complains there is no operating system it can boot on, something must happened to the hard drive, either a loose cable or the hard drive stopped to rotate.

Until then, I will use my desktop computer (not sure if I will be able to develop my 3D project on it, since I get lots of BSoDs when using the graphics card) or one of the school's awesome computers.

That sucks, I'm sorry

Update: I went to the Staples store where I bought my laptop and they said the hard drive simply stopped to function. Will take at least 7 openable days to repair, with a non-negligeable risk of data loss. So if you can see the BIOS booting and have a CD booting as well, but the BIOS complains there is no operating system it can boot on, something must happened to the hard drive, either a loose cable or the hard drive stopped to rotate.

Until then, I will use my desktop computer (not sure if I will be able to develop my 3D project on it, since I get lots of BSoDs when using the graphics card) or one of the school's awesome computers.

Make sure you get a price quote on that hard drive repair before you commit to anything... Hard drive repair could be $$$.

I just got my laptop back. So they replaced the hard drive (and they gave me the old one ) and the batteries, and they installed Windows Vista (yuck?) with all the HP stuff that comes with HP laptops.

So today, I'll do an install party: I'll upgrade the preinstalled Vista Home Premium with a newer and better 7 Pro that I got for free, install all my software and install Arch Linux in dual-boot. And all that while studying some big Spanish exam I have tomorrow.

Yeah, the only laptop I had (not including my current netbook) back around 2001 to 2003 or 2004 didn't last too long, either. I used it all the time (it was my main computer at the time) and tried to take care of it, but something new always seemed to go wrong every few months. Eventually, the whole power supply circuitry finally gave up, and it was pronounced dead after barely limping along for the previous year or two. (The 10 GB HDD survived, though, and I actually used it in my desktop computer for a while a couple of years ago using an adapter I found in a computer store.) Nowadays, I pretty much shy away from laptops completely due to that experience.

I think the main problems with laptops is that they're constantly being moved and banged around, there is a ton of major heat-producing stuff crammed into an insanely tiny space with virtually no room for any effective cooling/ventilation, and everything suffers because of it. Come to think of it, it's perhaps a bit amazing they even manage to last as long as they do.

I think it's mostly due to the fact the stuff is so much more fragile and they're not done to be used intensively for stuff like gaming or even a server.

Ok, I guess we really need to be careful, then... something that is very hard when you are in a city bus heading to college on roads that look like that:

Ouch X.x I'm sorry to hear. I wonder if the problem is more on the software side or on the hardware one...