Arrggghhhh!!! Living in Tech Support Purgatory or Why you need to be nice to you geek

Okay the saga of Lorraine’s boss’ computer continues.  Thought I had it set.  Nope, couldn’t get the spiffy LCD monitor to work (worked great on my machine, including doing the extended desktop thing, which is tre cool), but I thought I had it licked.  Yeah, right.  Yep Blue Screen of Death coming back.  Random shutoffs and reboots still there.  Sigh.  Most of you would say, “Just wipe the bugger and start fresh.”, yeah well that isn’t always a good option.  They’ve got accounting software on there, who knows when the last time they backed up was, you get the idea.

There is hope and it is the semi-secret non-destructive reinstall of XP option.  I actually tried this yesterday, but it didn’t look like it would work.  In hindsight, I think I needed an XP SP1 CD not SP2 to make it work.  Since I finally got SP2 on the bugger yesterday, my handy SP2 CD is doing its job, yeah after two tries.

This is one sick machine.  From this experience I have another tip, a very important tip: never, ever, ever throw away the original CDs that come with your machine.  Why?  Because if you need to start fresh those are your salvation.  That’s your copy of Windows and even other drivers you need.  For example both my HP and Dell machines need an additional driver install CD to make it play nice again after a clean install.  No CD, buddy you’re downloading.  A lot.  No Windows CD?  You’re going to be hoping your geek or a friend has a CD you can borrow to use.

Why am I saying this?  Well, you probably guessed, I called this morning to find the original CDs for this poor machine.  “Oh we threw them away I think.”  Yeah, great.

I’m on somethng like hour 8 with this bugger.  No install CDs means I’m going to be hunting for drivers once I get this fresh copy of XP updated.

Related to this is that I had to reinstall Vista last night.  No big problem, I just ran into the problem of the Vista partion running out of space.  Yes, I had plenty of space on the XP side, but really that was going to wind up being a pain.  So, a quick boot from my Vista DVD, reparition, reformat, install, ta da!  Took me maybe an hour.  Carbonite is updating my files for me as I write this.  Had to bring Outlook back from a backup I made just before I did the reinstall, no biggie.

See the difference?  I have files backed up.  I have CDs handy with drivers (okay I had to re-download the flash card reader drivers).  I could back up important files.  Easy.  Now I’m a one OS machine again.  Nice.

Oh, one more thing to add to my fun.  Lorraine brought her old machine home from her sister’s place.  Yep, another machine to connect to the network, copy files to from the other machine, update with patches, etc.

Man, what a weekend!