[Hidden-tech] need onsite computing help: The Movie

[Mary C. McKitrick at MCM Voices]

I wanted to apologise to the many kind people who emailed me offering their
services, and to explain what happened.  I called Dell on Friday to take
care of the minor problem on my other machine, feeling certain they could
handle that (they could, eventually, without any damage to my computer) and
asked their advice about the other problems.  They said I should call
Microsoft.  I thought I would try that   What a mistake.  Three hours and
several Microsoft techs later, my computer no longer functioned.   Also, I
couldn't even retrieve my email via the web because of a glitch with the way
my inboxes had been set up by my email host, so I couldn't contact any of
you who had written.

 

I happened to have a business card from a computer consultant I had met
along the way - someone who works part time at the computer store at Smith
and also has a private consulting business.  He knows Dell computers
thoroughly - in fact he sold me all the computers I have - and was able to
restore everything except email & his rates were very reasonable.  He told
me that what took the longest was getting all the updates for my machine,
since it looks like the updater software never did work properly so I had
about 9 months of updates coming.   He mentioned that Dell is really easy to
deal with because their website is organised so well and finding drivers and
updates is straightforward.  I always learn a lot from computer crashes and
haven't lost anything yet except for email - and a periodic "catastrophic"
email purge can be a good thing.  The program I use for managing contact
information, Time & Chaos, is easy to restore if you back up your data
regularly (I back it up numerous times per day :-) ) and I also use it to
store the content of significant emails, so losing email isn't a big deal.

 

One of the little busy-work jobs I did while my computer was down was to
organise all the business cards from you and others into a binder in storage
pages made for that purpose.  It struck me how those little analog data
nuggets are still incredibly useful at certain times.

 

Microsoft had scheduled a follow-up call to me on Monday, and I gave them an
earful.

 

Thank-you to all who wrote to me.

 

Best wishes,

 

Mary

 

Mary C. McKitrick

MCM Voices

mcm at mcmvoices.com

http://www.mcmvoices.com

DEMOS:  <http://www.mcmvoices.com/demo.htm>
http://www.mcmvoices.com/demo.htm

BLOG: http://www.mcmvoices.com/blog/blog.htm

 

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