I rarely go  to theaters.  It’s not the prices necessarily, though 5 bucks for popcorn is still shocking.  It is more that I enjoy being comfortable at home watching it.  So usually when a big hit comes out, my particular take on it is about six months late when the DVD releases.

And occasionally the movie in question has generated a stir of complaints and controversies that I hear about in depth before I even have a chance to see for myself what the fuss was all about.

Such was the case with Disney/Pixar’s Wall*E.

I heard in nauseating detail about the leftist indoctrinations, the insults and insensitivity to the obese and a few other complaints.

I was prepared to not like it, as I tend to dislike paying money to be preached at.

I was wrong.  I loved it.

First, the actual story.  The setting:  Earth in the 29th century.  The world has become overtaken by a global corporation (BnL or Buy n Large) and for 700 years has been completely depopulated.  The world has become a scrap heap of trash, with only clean up robots left to perform a seemingly endless task of providing trash compacted order out of chaos.  Life is apparently limited to a bug, who is our hero’s pet. 

(Keep in mind this is Disney no matter how slick and amazing the CGI is.  Disney has always been the master of projecting humanity to non human subjects, be it animals, cars or plants.  And now robots.)

Our Hero is WALL*E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class) a self aware clean up bot reminiscent of a cross between Short Circuit’s Johnny 5 and ET.  Our story is limited to the one unidentified city, but the implication is that he is alone after centuries of tireless toiling.

Wall*E is a collector of Humanities oddities:  A spork, a Rubiks cube, a Zippo lighter and even a dented hub cap are fascinating.  He toils the day away, watches show tunes at home and then turns in to restart his Herculean task all over again, after a morning’s breakfast (solar charge).  He is dented, rusted, living on spare parts but loveable and appealing.

I am back after 3 or 4 days of wrestling with computers.

My laptop where I write a lot of my posts has been a plague for a while, and got to the point where it was unusable.

The problem was that when I had some problems a while back, I fixed it by upgrading to Vista.

Now, let me state that I have two computers in my house, one a laptop, that run Vista flawlessly.  I have no real beefs about the new Windows OS, except one feature I dislike, but that I can live with on my other computers.

The problem is, that my laptop is a bit older (3 years) and it was not designed to run Vista.  So when I ran the upgrade adviser it passed, but only barely did it meet the requirements. 

So in effect, I had to dumb Vista down immensely, and even then, it was slow and chunky.

Well, in returning it to Windows XP, where it ran fast and good, I ran into a problem, a kind of IT catch 22.  Essentially, I found that I could not upgrade, obviously, and my first two attempts to do a parallel install left me with so much Vista legacy stuff on the hard drive that Windows XP was slightly unstable.  The real problem was that without a Floppy drive, I had a hard time formatting the hard drive and reinstalling.  You see, I could not use the Windows setup program to format the hard drive, as all of its temp install files were installed to the hard drive.

I needed an old school boot disk, a floppy with the utilities that I needed that could boot the computer independently.  Normally a simple thing…when you have a floppy disk drive…which I didn’t.

Finally I had to make a bootable CD ROM that contained an image of a Windows 98 boot disk, making this in effect a Windows 98 boot cd.  I also copied the core Windows XP files to that CD when I burned it.