I remember my first computer, way back when. I reformatted the hard drive about once a month. *lol* But then, I only had about 710,000 disk space (that’s right, less than one megabyte). It didn’t run on Windows, it ran on DOS.
Right now I’m in the process of backing up my hard drive using the Windows backup (two weekends ago I used the backup that came with my Iomega hard drive and I’ll never, ever, ever, ever use that POS software again). And when that’s done, I’ll reformat for the third time.
I reformatted on 4-22. Because I hit the master power switch instead of the monitor power switch on 4-23, during the download of Windows service pack 2, I again reformatted on 4-23.
Then I found my games would not work with this monitor. They worked fine before the reformat, but now, I kept getting an “out of frequency” message and the monitor would shut down. *sigh* It took 45 frustrating minutes to finally get a hold of someone at Dell who would take my $99.00 so that I could speak with a real live tech who spoke real live English without a real live heavy accent. Oh, and two of the numbers I called were actually porn lines. The 800 number on Dell’s front page and one of the numbers one of the outsourced heavily accented techs gave me. I actually kind of yelled at the woman who took my money. She kept butting in and wouldn’t let me finish saying what I had to say. I can understand that she has to get on with the show, but she’s paid by the hour, not the phone call.
My phone showed I was on the line for 121 minutes. When my conversation with tech support was finished, I could see the game. Then I rebooted. Heh. I transferred the games to the laptop.
Then I upgraded my QuickBooks, since Intuit was going to stop supporting the version I had. It went very smoothly, but now I had to log in and after the screen saver kicked in, I had to log back in. I put in a service request from Intuit and within a half hour, I got a call back. Support did what he could to help, I ended up doing two system restores while he was on the line.
I finally told him to call back later, as I had windows to wash (had an appraiser coming by Friday because we want to up our home equity line of credit and I felt we’d do a little better if the house was a little more clean). Between washing windows and sliding glass doors and screens, I found by searching the internet, that I couldn’t get rid of the program that was making me log in if I wanted to run the lates version of QuickBooks. Nice that support obviously didn’t know that.
Finally got everything running by Tuesday night. Then yesterday morning, my wireless mouse wasn’t running. The USB hub quit. And when I got a replacement, it wasn’t seeing it as USB 2.0. And then when I tried to browse the pictures on my picture card using Paint Shop Pro, it wasn’t opening the external hard drive. It saw it. But it wouldn’t browse it.
So, right now I’m backing up the hard drive using the Windows backup (I also find out the D drive isn’t working properly) and once that’s done, I’ll be reformatting and starting over.
I’m hating this. It needed to be done, but I wish it wasn’t such a PITA. Oh, well, my A is big enough to spread the pain out.