PA Business Systems is a company selling computer, seemingly mainly refurbished Packard Bell systems. It's a cheap way of getting a decent spec computer for substantially less than the inflated price that PC World and Packard Bell seem to manage to create between them. However it is still a Packard Bell and thus "weird" in some ways.

The Poorhouse has one such machine. It came to pass that it was desirable to "re-master" it. Re-master is Packard Bell speak for reinstalling Windows and the applications it came with - basically reverting it to factory settings, and is what PB annoyingly try and recommend for pretty much any error you encounter, down to the level of "my fingernail broke when typing the letter X". However, upon careful following of the instructions provided a nice black screen came up saying something along the lines of "This computer contains no valid information". Amazing.

Limited diagnosis and fixing was possible as the machine contained no floppy disk drive and like many recent Packard Bells no recovery CD - rather the information to revert its settings is stored on a hidden partition on the hard disk. As the Poorhouse used to have the absolute curse of supporting such hideous machines it was clear that it was something to do with the tattoo - a stupid Packard Bell system that only lets you remaster the computer if you have a certain bit of invisible information on your hard disk. Presumably it's to stop piracy or something, but all it really does is cause suicidal annoyance and expensive-to-the-consumer support calls. It was a dreaded-ish task at the support centre because it took a while, involves the often-ignorant-through-no-fault-of-own user typing scary-looking stuff accurately and is needlessly mind-bending to fix.

Luckily, PABS have their own support centre it seems, and unlike the Poorhouse's previous colleagues they seem to know what they are doing, if you can put up with the patronising telephone queue message. And, it didn't cause any fuss, trauma or anger to implement the solution.

The solution? Well, when the computer asked for its serial number, the Poorhouse was inane, nay let's say stupid, enough to carefully locate and reproduce the serial number of the machine in question, which resulted in the "no valid information" message. What one is supposed to do is randomly guess - because it's not documented anywhere in the world that the Poorhouse can find - that you are supposed to type in a totally different serial code that bears no resemblance to anything on your machine or in your documentation. The Poorhouse can excitedly reveal that the number in question is A123456789.

Presumably this only works on PA Business System refurbished Packard Bells. Nonetheless, happy remastering!