October 2, 06

Venting ahead... beware!

I am about to do something I never have.... use our Blog for a personal vent. If you love your computer, understand your computer and never have any computer problems, you might want to skip this entry...... HOWEVER if you and your computer don't always see eye to eye, and have had visions of smashing it to bits perhaps you can share in my pain and frustration.

September 1st we bought a new computer for the office, the old one was only 3 years old but was having some major issues. We always have all weddings backed up and saved on external hard drives and burned to duplicate sets of DVD's , so clients weddings are never in danger, but our programs were another issue. We bought a nice new HP and I spent countless hours finding, and reloading all of the programs that we use for the business and lost when the original computer crashed. Last week I had everything set up and working perfectly, everything was neatly arranged and I was up and running beautifully! Life was good.

Since I had everything exactly how I wanted and needed it, I started asking around about programs that you could use to back up all of your programs etc. so that if this happened to me again, I would not need to spend so much time getting things back up and running. I was told about Norton Ghost, and had purchasing that on my "To Do" list. No hurry right... this was a brand new computer, just 30 days old, totally protected from all virus's etc... I was fine, had plenty of time...... you would think huh?

Nope... yesterday, I had the Geek Squad come out because I had a windows installer pop up occurring. When the Geeks arrived at 3pm this was my only issue, when they left at 7:30, my hard drive was bad, all programs that I had just installed gone, and I needed to take the whole thing back to Best Buy and start all over. Because I have time for that???????????

So... today it is back to Best Buy to return the computer and begin that long, tedious, frustrating task of building all of the programs we use back in. I think I may be spending the rest of my life in this chair ;-(

Moral of the story...
#1. NEVER trust your computer, it is evil. I am now convinced it sits there overnight dreaming up ways to throw your work day into turmoil.
#2. Either marry a computer geek or train your children to be computer geeks, you will save tons of money!
#3. Always back up all of your software programs, knowing where to find all of your install disks is also a big plus.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh! I feel the need for some serious retail therapy coming soon! Maybe I will buy a REALLY big hammer to hang over the new computer ...... just in case ;-)