Technical Difficulties

Ugh. Recently I purchased a brand new notebook from a well known technology "super store". My current one, which I had had for two years, was beginning to show signs of impending doom - hard drive noises, sluggish performance. I have been doing IT support long enough to know that I was looking at problems (or so I thought). I figured I would be proactive and treat myself.

I bring the cool notebook home and install all my software and spend about a day getting it up to speed with the old notebook. Then, with the appropriate amount of pomp and circumstance, I retired the old machine.

In the two weeks since, several of the major software programs naturally released major upgrades, including my accounting software. And Monday night, I downloaded a bunch of new family photos from an event that was held this weekend.

Tuesday morning? "Cannot find Windows file HAL.DLL - please reinstall file or operating system. GOD DAMMIT. No warning at all. Just death, pure and simple. Brand new freaking machine with all the software updated. I do some quick trouble shooting (after all, I am an IT guy) and nothing. I pretty much figure that I am screwed (well, I have to deal with technical support, which is similar).

Now luckily, I am a big believer in backups and I had a fairly recent one. So I quickly dust off the recently retired computer, bring it back online and get all the anti-virus and security programs updated. But then I realize that I updated a lot of software, especially my accounting software, over the web. And now, I could not read my accounting data files. GOD DAMMIT.

Another call, to another technical support. After much back and forth with the technical support people to get them to understand what my problem was, I was finally pointed to a web site to download all the new software. So I get the old computer back up to speed and get running again.

Then what happens? My backup hard drive fails - an external one that I back up all my data to. Now fortunately this happens after I restored everything, but none the less, it was quite close to being a complete loss. Luckily I had an old one which still worked well, so I could back everything up again just in case I had another crash. Funny that the brand new computer and external hard drive fail immediately but the older computer and external drive work well. I wondered if it could have been a virus but do not believe so.

So after a lot of on hold time (Michael Bolton seems to get a lot of business with on hold music services), I am told by HP that a replacement hard drive will be sent for the new computer. Now you can imagine I do not have much faith. But once I get it, I will install it and go through the whole process of getting the new computer up and running.

I am supposed to be on vacation damit, why am I dealing with this BS?