G Dammit, every time I break up with my GF she calls this retread tech in from Prince George to service the mills she oversees. Today the CFO of the other mill brought in her laptop she got from this "other guy"
Symptom: she got 2 flashdrives and they didn’t even light up when plugged in. No big deal, Acers sometimes do that when you plug in a similar USB device, you just delete the ??USBs in the Device manager and refresh, it fixes it. But the GD thing took 5 minutes or more to start. Device manager was completely blank, even in admin Safe mode. No virus-y looking services running…
Run BartPE: the GD thing has a 40 Gig, split dead down the middle into 2 partitions, one is totally empty. Both are GD FAT32!!! Chkdsk fixed a few errors, no viruses, no weird shit in HiJackThis
Repair from CD: Battery dies during install. Scrounge up AC adapter & restart Repair. Comes to Repair Current Installion and identifies it as an UPGRADE. Then fails with error codes 426 and Fatal “catalog” Error. Renaming catroot2 per MSKnowledge useless.
It looks like this C%^T partitioned her drive with 98, then used an upgrade to XPHome. She has a legit sticker on the laptop, but the funny thing is the number seems to ring a bell, like I’ve seen it before.
Funny thing is I’ve got their old shipping desktop from the same dude, and it’s the same model as a Touch system I sold them, but with the name sticker peeled off (sticky glue outline is still there) and a crappy mobo/chip combo. It had Win2000, no sticker and took 2 -3 minutes to open a file! Also FAT32 with Ghost.
I’m not a fan of backing up your hard-drive on the same GD drive. I took the one I sold them away last year cuz it ‘looked like’ a desktop so they kept putting a monitor on top over the vent and cooking the P4!
I’m debating removing the partitions, formatting and fresh install and telling her 'you lost all your files, too fucking bad"
arrggghhh!
What’s wrong with bookkeepers? They just keep using the damn computers until they’re FUBAR and then expect you to fix it in an hour.
ALL book keepers are cheap. They don’t want to spend $$ to have a decent laptop or a laptop with a burner in it. They expect the laptop to do the backup’s for them also. RIGHT!! every one i have touched they all say oh it’s suppose to do a back up it’s self. Ok how should it do the back up via magic? I love it when there machine’s die and they expect you to recover there data for free or in less than 5 min.
Installed windows over top of 98 EWW. Some computer tech.!
Well it’s formatted and unpartioned now. Even found her Simply files in some obscure folder she forgot about. Simply 5.0, pre Y2K! OMG how do they get paid so much for being so stupid…
Heh, bean counters are the same every where, they hate to shell out cash.
Your ex is lucky you’re willing to put in the time and fix her unit.
Next time it crashes install Linux for her and tell her it is a new and improved version of windows…it’ll run forever. 
[quote=“hitest”]
Heh, bean counters are the same every where, they hate to shell out cash.
Your ex is lucky you’re willing to put in the time and fix her unit.
Next time it crashes install Linux for her and tell her it is a new and improved version of windows…it’ll run forever. [/quote]
Simply wont run on linux 
But it would be worth the try to show her. Or even better yet. Next time Back up her files, then format it with fresh windows stating all files were lost Tuff crap and you should have back them up your self.
Sure it will.
winehq.com/[/quote]
I would actually recommend crossover office instead applications dont mysteriously stop working between different versions like with wine.
Unfortunatly simply accounting is “untested” but people have made it work
[quote=“jleaman”]
Heh, bean counters are the same every where, they hate to shell out cash.
Your ex is lucky you’re willing to put in the time and fix her unit.
Next time it crashes install Linux for her and tell her it is a new and improved version of windows…it’ll run forever.
Simply wont run on linux
But it would be worth the try to show her. Or even better yet. Next time Back up her files, then format it with fresh windows stating all files were lost Tuff crap and you should have back them up your self.[/quote]
My post was a poor attempt at humour. I meant format her HD, install Linux with a nice shiny GUI, put open office on there…then tell her it is windows…and…my jokes suck…dang. 
One thing about my old gf, (whoops I should say last) she was so anal everything was backed up on a D: drive, backed up on the office server, remote backed on an offsite server in my building and on her portable drive too. Honest to God she was the only bookkeeper-CGA I ever met that knew dick about directories, subfolders, backups etc.
I’ve seen ones who serve 10 companies and all the files are on the root drive. Taught them all how to use Nero when Simply got to big to sve on a floppy. Then got calls from the bigshots in Vancouver and PG and had to explain one by one: copy it on your destop, change it from read only, doh!
And these are the people who MADE us use Win-Tel, arrrgh…
And flash drives! Whoah, show a bookkeeper a flashdrive and their eyes pop out, they get an expression like some isolated New Guinea tribesman seeing a ‘thunderstick’ for the first time…
Anyone ever tried HandyBackup? Cheap and easy to use, mine zips and backs up the simply & documents folder every night at 5, or if you log off and event 2 backs it up to ftp site every Friday.