So you come back from vacation and you can’t wait to get back to work on your Windows computer and catch up on e-mail and load your photos from vacation, etc. You power up your E-Machines you bought two years ago and it churns a little extra and you don’t see Windows and you start to get a little worried. Oops, but here comes a message …
Inconvenience? I think you got this sick feeling that this is one of those bad system resource screw ups or maybe a partially failed hard drive … hardly just an inconvenience. You are probably betting that this will be at least 20 hours work to restore or get repaired … and … uh … maybe you lost some data. Data? When was the last backup?
You re-boot. You pound on the F11 key a few times. Over and over. Hey! It’s booting Windows. Maybe the E-Machines just needed a little longer vacation than you did. Oh yeah … it booted Windows alright, but none of our applications are showing up and none of your log-in settings or desktop icons are anywhere to be found.
After a little more searching you find as much data as you can find and you back up to a CD-ROM. The backup to CD-ROM works … whew. Now you resign yourself to pull the plugs and take your E-Machine over to Best Buy where you purchased an extended warranty.
At Best Buy now, they do a full system test after you tell them your sad story and they keep your box/CPU/hard drive for a few days. The results? Your hard drive has gone bad. After a week, you get a new hard drive free of charge and the techs at Best Buy restore your hard drive … thanks to the fact that you actually created the Restore Disks that E-Machines advised you to do when you first set up your computer. They even update the latest Microsoft Windows security patches and get rid of the advertising promotions that come with the original factory settings on the computer.
Now it’s time for you to go to work on your computer. You take it home, plug it in. Re-install Nortons Antivirus. No problem. It accepts your code you kept on file and gives you your updated application and antivirus files. Re-install Webroot Spy Sweeper. No problem. You give the software your code on file and it gives you everthing you need.
AOL installs just fine. Your Greeting Card software … fine. Your printer gets recognized just fine when you plug in the USB cable. Fine. Then you install your Office 97 upgrade that is supposed to work when Microsoft Works is present on your drive, which it IS present. But nooooope. It doesn’t seem to be able to find an accetable application to allow the upgrade.
Oh … the hell with it. Just get the latest Microsoft Office 2007
RAVE for fine work by Best Buy techs and RAVE for yourself for getting lucky with the extended warranty, keeping your software codes on file, and creating and FINDING your Restore Disks … from way, way back.
RANT for E-Machines for not including a hard drive that would last more than two years. And RANT for Microsoft for not finding Microsoft Works on the restored new hard drive and allowing the Office 97 upgrade.