It destroyed access to the system. I couldn’t open Windows again. They told me what it would do was that “it will eventually destroy the whole system and you’ll lose the whole lot”. When it failed, I gave up.
Your knowledge of computers might very well be greater than mine. I simpy took them at face value and believed what they’d said.
I’ve since become aware that specialist companies can get at the disc and retrieve stuff - however that wasn’t an easy option, even if I’d known it, because it was one half of the disc and the other half was in continuous use for other purposes.
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What you understand is wrong, almost entirely. I’ll not respond.
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I doubt that would have been necessary but its all water under the bridge now.
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My first home computer was a Compaq “running” Windows 98, at least when it wasn’t frozen, which I later upgraded to Windows 2000.
When I did a defrag on it in 2004. it would no longer boot up. and I sent it to a computer expert in Ingham who managed to recover a small part of the total data off it.
I have never done a defrag since.
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I used to have a Windows PC. I had to get a tech expert to drop by regularly at a minimum of $200 a call.
I switched to a Mac 5 years ago and have never had a tech expert to drop by. The Mac runs Office just fine. If anything goes wrong I call applecare, based in Australia! They have fixed the problem every time, over the phone. I expect I’ve saved at least $4,000 in the past five years from not having to get a tech person to call in.
Windows is the operating system from hell, not mention their appalling security holes.
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Or an external caddy.
Except! Depending on whether the disc was encrypted? TPM + bitlocker it may not be so straight forward.
It is certainly less stress and pain to have a reliable back up regime. Whole of system for when the main drive/s fail and one needs the system back ASAP. Regular data backups for any failure any time.
Working for myself in a past life I have great empathy for anyone caught out by a drive or PC/laptop crash. My only sad tale being one obsessed with redundancy - a USB drive that was accidentally flicked across the room onto a concrete wall. Stone dead, with the most recent content not yet duplicated being off line at the time.
I’d not be quite so blunt,
There are several Choice topics devoted to how we can all find better solutions,
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Consider that @JeanPierre’s point was that he had a support contract and obeyed the support tech’s instructions that made his PC non-bootable. And continued to believe the tech that it was ‘all lost’.
Providing options today for a problem years ago? Many of us were more naive and less attentive to the possibilities, trials, and tribulations of becoming The sysadmin, as well as being trusting of Microsoft Services themselves, only a few (or sometimes many more) years ago.
Which is what most people reasonably did, and continue to do. Regardless of OS anyone needs to be at least a little sceptical of techs providing advice, especially remotely. You can bet your PC on some of them, and others are more like a pokie, and there is no way to tell - excepting with a Microsoft business card one would reasonably presume they know what they are doing.
At the end of it, cancelling the contract with a refund and essentially ‘hanging up on the problem’ was pretty sad.
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Thanks. I thought so too. Especially when he basically told me that unless I could get hold of a second hand copy of Windows 7 that both Service Packs already installed in it, and reinstall Windows 7 using that, then there was nothing else I could do, except watch as the system slowly deteriorated until it failed completely and then I would lose the lot. Which is precisely what did happen.
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Sadly it’s all too typical. For goodness sake it’s 2021 and the ‘diagnostic’ functions on my Windows based devices are a relic from the DOS era. MS doesn’t give a rats about individual consumers but whatcha gonna do, go to Apple where the price of admission is $4k plus for a laptop? My HP laptop won’t even talk to my HP printer reliably, I’d have expected that the two together would be amazing but alas no. It’s been said before but if MS built cars personal transportation would grind to a halt.
When you’re #1 why try harder, MS is another company that gets away with what they can rather than providing what they should. Sadly it’s a case of their offering being rubbish but consumers are unable to change behaviour as there’s little alternative in a world that revolves around connectivity. Interesting market position, sadly there was no challenger to MS when they were ‘challengeable’.
Sorry to hear about your woes, glad you got it fixed.
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Have you forgotten IBM OS/2? It took the superior nous and marketing brilliance only a company like IBM could cobble together to have it fail miserably in the face of Windows.
Capitalism is about profit, not about being #1 and spending precious profits and dividends pushing the envelope. At least not until there is a #2 nipping at your heels.
If one steps back the general reliability and features of Win10 is quite amazing considering it is open to what and sundry bits of software as well as peripherals and their drivers. My point of reference is as a [very dated] SCADA and ‘big iron’ (not IBM!) OS and communications developer followed by years on the business side of ‘the house’, and then some.
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If you don’t like Microsoft products, then don’t use them.
It has been a long time since MS dominated the home computer market.
Apart from one laptop using Win10, everything I use is another operating system.
And on that one Win10 laptop, I use no MS products. Everything from browsers to email to office functions is open source preferably or from other software companies.
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“My HP laptop won’t even talk to my HP printer reliably”
ROTFLMHFAO - that just about takes the biscuit! Don’t they have something in Silicon Valley, patterned on the annual “Darwin Award” for the stupidest way someone killed themself, but targeting the stupidest thing someone in the computer industry has done?
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IBM
Sorry, to clarify I was staying OT and referring to their customer support offering as ‘rubbish’. It could be the best system in the world, and for the most part mine is quite reliable. Until it isn’t and then it’s a frustrating exercise for an average someone like me who isn’t versed in apps or software or MS. I either just live with it or spend hours researching a fix on line, neither of which is appealing. And trying to work something out through MS channels is a nasty waste of time.
Indeed and I know folks who do exactly this but I’d wager it’s not really an alternative for thousands of average punters who shop at big box stores eg Hardly Normal and are only familiar with MS because they use it at work (MS market penetration at work again).
I heard they thought about it but some genius calculated it’d take 2.3 years to assess all of the entries.
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This is a problem.
At work it would be typical there would be a Windows desktop with the various apps. But it would be controlled. The apps would be preinstalled. The users would not be administrators. And your first level support would be experienced people employed by the company.
But go out and buy a desktop or laptop for home and it will mostly have Windows preinstalled and out of the box it will just boot up and away you go.
But by default will be full administrator privileges. You will get onto the Net and download all sorts of software and gadgets and widgets, all of which can screw up things.
And who is your first level support? Someone, somewhere, who has no idea of what you have done on your computer. One of zillions of home computer users around the world. It is hardly surprising that MS support is not customized to your particular problem.
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Priceless! So how come I have an HP printer, that’s been working for years off my iMAC? On the previous one a well - even while half of it was still functioning as MS Windows 7 (ie, on both sides of the disc - Apple as well as MS)? Just not an HP computer?
Both as a plugin printer, and as a WiFi connection?
Excuse me for saying so - but that’s just plain nuts!
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It would appear that you’re computer savvy beyond most people who shop in big box stores, true? So the issue of poor MS support probably doesn’t bother you. Users don’t necessarily expect that MS support should be specifically customised to a particular problem, but they probably do expect there to be well sorted accessibility to such support and a helpful problem solving process for basic issues. The frustration expressed by the OP was based on an experience with MS that fell short of reasonable expectations for most folks’ user profile.
Feel free. I have no idea why your configs worked. Why did it work with my Toshiba? Currently the only way to run a print job is to run the HP Print and Scan Doctor first. Nuts indeed.
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Yes I am more computer savvy than most users I would hope as that is my profession.
Support people can do only limited things over the phone, or by email, or those awful help bots on support sites.
Sometimes it needs a user with a problem to take it to a professional who has all the diagnostic tools to deal with it.
Or they can come to your home or business and deal with the problem.
Or remotely access your computer, which does require serious trust, and I would never allow.
None of that would be free.
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I am not in the business of IT support, but I do know enough about computers to be the family fixer - and it is generally impossible to fix complex problems over the phone. The modern operating system has tens of millions of lines of code, and when something goes wrong you need to test and eliminate a bunch of potential reasons, plenty of which I have no idea about until I start doing my own research.
Sorry, but we all need someone with some problem-solving skills to figure out the cause and fix some of these system errors. Nobody can do that over the phone. I have myself had to call technicians in several times, although the last time I did that I solved the problem and still got the bill.
Have a look under a modern car bonnet. It is nothing like cars of the '70s, where you could actually see that the drive belt was broken and borrow a pair of stockings as a quick-‘n’-dirty side of the road repair. I think you void the warranty if you try to jump-start a modern car, while a roll start probably won’t work as most cars sold in the last 20 years are automatic. And cars are orders of magnitude less complex than the combination of computing hardware and software.
It is unclear from some of the reports in this thread whether the operating system was in fact the problem, or simply the way a problem in hardware or other software such as device drivers manifested itself.
GPs diagnose and treat health problems. IT professionals diagnose and treat IT problems.
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We are seeing glimpses of a common mode of failure of problem solving. It is to simplify a complex problem so that a single cause can be found and blame apportioned. This method can be used in politics to slag the opposition or just to give a quick and easy “solution”.
From that point you may then go in several directions; form a dogpile so that all the participants each feel good about getting their kick in, declare the superiority an adversary or just have a generalised whinge.
Nor am I although I once was. Even a few years out of the game and your certificates all turn to dust and your pronouncements turn to a pocket full of mumbles.
One observation that is broad enough that I feel I can still say it lacking modern in-depth knowledge. Starting from MSDOS and moving on to Windows perched on MSDOS, Windows re-written with a new core, then Windows of many numbers and names up to 11 there is a huge change in the conglomerate that is today called an operating system. It is now a vast assemblage of components that together do far more than than what started as a Disk Operating System. This is done on a multitude of hardware platforms with optional add-on devices and supports a galaxy of applications in many languages in different environments.
I don’t know how many millions (or billions) of Windows installations there are but if you combine all the permutations of hardware, firmware, software, options, configurations and sequences of installation history I think it is possible that each machine is unique, or perhaps one of few. In any event it is impossible for any technician to exactly know what they are dealing with looking at a beige box, short of a new disk image that they have studied extensively - and even then I am not convinced they could.
The outcome is that for any presenting problem the solution can vary from the flick of a switch (if you know which one) to an adhesive impenetrable mess that defies analysis in any reasonable time.
It may be apocryphal but it is reported that Bill Gates once said he wanted to make “computers as easy to use as washing machines”. Well we are on the way to equivalence but not by simplifying the computers but by complicating the washing machines.
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The trouble is that if computers still used such an operating system they would never gain their current ubiquity. Complexity is far higher in Windows 10 with its ~50 million lines of code than in DOS with its few thousand lines of code. That complexity may be largely hidden, but when a user (or even an expert) trips up on it they can have nightmares.
On the bright side, most people no longer have nightmares about loading all their drivers in the right order to fit into memory with config.sys and autoexec.bat - and those who do can check on the Internet for solutions.
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