A couple of weeks ago Dan's computer died. The Big Blue Screen of Death.
Dan needs his computer. He's all but housebound after the stroke and the computer is a necessary life line. I dropped the machine off at the local computer repair shop who booked it in for a good looking at in their first available slot; which was ten days later (busy people). A couple of days ago they phoned me with the news that the hard drive was indeed totally snuffed. There were no recoverable data and what did I want to do with the large paperweight that had been Dan's laptop?
To cut a long and boring story (down to a short and boring story) it cost £70 to get a new hard drive installed. It would have cost that much again to install the OS. It seemed crazy to to pay for a highly trained professional Microsoft certified computer repair person to sit in front of the machine and watch status bars crawl across the screen and occasionally hit the enter key. So this afternoon I spent a merry couple of hours watching status bars crawl across the screen and occasionally hitting the enter key in as confidant a manner I could muster, stopping only to turn the machine upside down and round this way and that (while it was still running) to find the COA number I needed to stop XP imploding after 30 days. (Why don't they ever put those things where you can bloody see them easily? I nearly broke my neck trying to read the one off the back of my machine the other week.)
So Dan is back on line. My good deed for the day.
Dan needs his computer. He's all but housebound after the stroke and the computer is a necessary life line. I dropped the machine off at the local computer repair shop who booked it in for a good looking at in their first available slot; which was ten days later (busy people). A couple of days ago they phoned me with the news that the hard drive was indeed totally snuffed. There were no recoverable data and what did I want to do with the large paperweight that had been Dan's laptop?
To cut a long and boring story (down to a short and boring story) it cost £70 to get a new hard drive installed. It would have cost that much again to install the OS. It seemed crazy to to pay for a highly trained professional Microsoft certified computer repair person to sit in front of the machine and watch status bars crawl across the screen and occasionally hit the enter key. So this afternoon I spent a merry couple of hours watching status bars crawl across the screen and occasionally hitting the enter key in as confidant a manner I could muster, stopping only to turn the machine upside down and round this way and that (while it was still running) to find the COA number I needed to stop XP imploding after 30 days. (Why don't they ever put those things where you can bloody see them easily? I nearly broke my neck trying to read the one off the back of my machine the other week.)
So Dan is back on line. My good deed for the day.
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