Tech Support

This weekend, I helped three people with computer stuff:

Two people got new computers and needed their old stuff transferred across. One was moving from a 6 year old PC to a new Laptop. The other was from a 4 year old PC to another desktop, plus a new printer/scan/copier. In the end, I spent over 8 hours of my weekend doing this work - and one is for money (yay), the other for babysitting time (YAY!!!!). It's actually pretty fun work for me but there are... frustrations...

Mostly it's in accessing/finding the right data in the old system to move: Stuff in 2004 was put in different places than they do now, so I need to get creative - lots of sleuthing. Also, the older systems have slower communications ports, so I spend a LOT of time waiting for data to copy over.

Then there's the "remove all of the crap" stage: PC vendors love to load up their machines with trial versions of software which pop up right and left with reminders to try and buy. It is my personal vendetta to eliminate all of these useless things and get them a working system right out of the gate.

All told, I wound up 98% successful: Turns out that one old program simply will NOT move to the new system and my client needs to shell out for an upgrade, which'll cost her over $700... and we're still trying to configure her email so that her contacts will show up (and I know they're in there....).

And I actually sort of enjoyed working with the new Windows machines - Vista isn't THAT bad, and the new computers were pretty snappy and responsive. The frustrations were with the older machines in both cases... but as I was in there moving things, realizing that the underpinnings are pretty much the same, I realized - I can enjoy Vista, but it's still Windows... it's still going to bite me someday. Still, I can't argue that there's some value: The laptop was under $700. The new CPU was $450. You just can't buy Macs for that price.

My third tech support call for the weekend was from the neighbor with a Mac: All of his pictures had disappeared, his backups weren't running, and a launch icon was missing. I had it fixed in 10 minutes and was home to tuck Bella in for bed.

I do love me some Macintosh... They may be a bit more expensive, but you save a lot of time.