Happy New Year!!!!!!!! Hope your 2013 is off to a great start. Our year sure is. So many improvements going on and things to look forward to. We love helping people with their technology!
We also absolutely love and adore our vendors. They are great to work with and some of them are the reason we even have a business. However, sometimes they create new policies without taking their clients and consultants into consideration.
Microsoft decided to save some money by no longer mailing out DVD’s for subscriptions to their TechNet software program. Sounds good as we are all about helping the enivronment and conserving resources, however, this has turned into a nightmare for consultants like us and our clients. Case in point, SBS migration over the holidays. 6GB download and all we had were 4.7GB DVD’s. And of course it was easy to obtain the next higher size at 2am. lol So we obtained the double capacity DVD’s several days later. After a 5 1/2 hour download, we burned the ISO to DVD. We booted from the DVD and all appeared fine, until about half way through the install it blue screened. Hours later we determined the downloaded file was corrupt. So we had to re-download another 5 hour, burn again, and then it worked fine. So let’s see, Microsoft saved 25 cents for a DVD and a few dollars in postage while costing me the consultant 20+ hours of my life I’ve never get back!!! This is yet another case where the company is so big they forget all about the customers who made them that big. We love Microsoft, however, sometimes they really do some stupid things. Something to work on Microsoft.
More recently, HP laptop repair for a customer. We love HP laptops as well as Dell laptops, but this item is something they both struggle with. Windows error, will not boot. New laptop only a month old, no restore points available, user has no data on it yet. So utilize the recovery partition and attempt to restore to factory settings. Multiple attempts fail! So what it keeps wanting is a Windows 7 Home Premium disk. But of course neither HP or Dell include these disks anymore. So what is the user supposed to do? Even techs are having trouble obtaining copies of the OEM disks. Why? Like you can somehow use them without a valid license. This is yet another case where the vendors are not thinking about how their new policy impacts their customers. So now the client has to wait while we attempt to get the vendor to mail us a DVD. This is disappointing and something we hope they will resolve. The recovery partition is great, when it works. However, when the hard drive has to be replaced then you are stuck again and the average customer doesn’t understand why and of course they need it now. They will lose more business to Apple if they don’t improve this process.
Ok, enough about that. Things in technology have been good this month. Looking forward to a great year.
Brad Howerter, The I.T. Guys
ITGuys Computer Repair Tampa 