Saturday 7 April 2012

Oh no's :(

Uuuuhhh. I somehow managed to screw up the 'permissions', aka security, on my Win 7 machine and it's taken three and a half hours of begging, brain picking and running scripts to fix it, because the numerous Windows tools, well, just wouldn't. 


As much as it comes in useful accumulating the 'old ways' of doing things, I'd almost forgotten just how much keyboard-pounding and mind bending tedium it takes. Perhaps we didn't know anything different back then. 


Mind you, if I'd taken it using a fork lift truck to a local lazy repair shop they would have wiped it, reinstalled it, found a non-existent hardware fault and charged me at least £150 for the privilege. And I would have spent many, many hours getting the machine the way I wanted it before it even saw a telephone line. 


In defence of your local PC shop? Though it's very common for them to do a 'wipe and re-install', because it's a quick and easy no brainer, and solves most problems, it should cost no more than, in my opinion £45, if you're happy with that. If you want them to recover and reinstall personal data and documents first, add another £25-£30 assuming no physical damage to the computer innards. 


Personally, I'd recommend if it's the only machine you have, going to the library with a notepad or borrowing someone else's machine and learning how to do it yourself. Should take no more than a couple of hours, most of that waiting.....

2 comments:

Rarelesserspotted said...

Hi Wheelie
Fascinating post for a technophobe like me (well not quite but I don't muck about with things I don't understand.) For me my only worry is material like photographs and documents which I save to an external hard drive. My itunes music is now saved to a cloud so if I lose the player or my computer goes belly up, I can get it back from the cloud (whatever the hell that is). Whatever happened to the typewriter, a bookshelf and a 35mm camera?
X

Wheelie said...

A Cloud is not really that much different from your external drive really.

It's a 'farm' of drives that are interconnected, and connected to the internet.

They often run into their thousands, and can either be in a giant complex somewhere in one place, or many complexes connected over the world to each other, the internet, and you.

The advantage is that you can access your data from anywhere where you have a device capable of accessing the internet.

As for 35mm, typewriters and bookshelves...

Post coming up :)