Shooting is too good for em

[leetmasterjames.livejournal.com]

Ive received two calls today of special note.

The first is from a woman that was upset that she couldent find her back, forward or refresh buttons ... in adobe reader. After explaining that she was thinking about Internet Explorer she then asked why she wasn't able to do anything else on the system. I remoted into her system and discovered she had set Adobe to full screen mode. Her reasoning is it would give her the buttons.

The next is from a moron that had a vista laptop in for a format and reinstall of windows. It would have been a repair but sorry cant do that in vista. She could not find her Office CD after the reinstall and was very upset with us for not installing Office 2007. I told her we cant do that as we don't have a key for it but if she provided one for us id be happy to install it. She went to HP and got a set of recovery discs. She then ran the recovery CDs. About half way through the process she calls me again and asks "What will these discs do?" I asked her if she had installed the Carbonite backup software we had sold her and she said no. After telling her that shes likely wiped out her data she stopped the disc thus making sure her system was boned. So at this point she is bringing the system to us so we can run the restore discs and restore her data from the backup we took. Then hand hold her trough installing Carbonite cause its OMG too hard.

Comments

[docskurlock.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. I've had people call me with something similar, and come to find out, it's not their computer that's "running slow," but their internet connection, or the zillions of crapware and other software they "need." Adobe Photo Launcher anyone?

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

One of my end users decided to run the system restore on their HP laptop , rather than calling me up to fix a very simple problem :(

[docskurlock.livejournal.com]

Oh god, are you serious? We had a customer run the system restore several times, and then called complaining because "things didn't work right anymore."

[toxico.livejournal.com]

It would have been a repair but sorry cant do that in vista.

So that whole Startup Repair option is a figment of my imagination then?

[gholam.livejournal.com]

Having personally done a repair of Vista install, I'm fairly certain the option is there. I acknowledge the possibility of me being stone drunk at the time and imagining the whole thing, but considering that my total alcohol consumption to date is about three beers, that possibility is quite remote.

[leetmasterjames.livejournal.com]

The startup repair in Vista checks to ensure that the MBR and boot related files are in place. There is no portion for Vista like in XP to delete all system files that are installed from the CD, place fresh copies of these files back on the system then reregister all related components without affecting customer data or installed programs (although you do have to reupdate windows from scratch).

If something like a major corruption due to say bad ram or hard drive occurs you have no choice in Vista but to reinstall from scratch.

In this case a piece of spyware was removed and in doing so messed up the TCPIP network components. We could get a DHCP assigned IP, we could ping anywhere we wanted but IE would not display anything. We installed firefox and it was no better. There were several other things we tried relating to the IP stack, device drivers, filters and so on but nothing worked. Generally with XP you do a repair, update windows and 90 minutes later you go on with life. With Vista reinstall from scratch after wasting a day or two on different solutions.

[gholam.livejournal.com]

[Bad Tommy Lee Jones imitation] This is just a figment of my imagination...

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

use system restore to roll the computer back to before the spyware hit. if that doesn't work, you should be able to "upgrade" the existing install to a clean copy of Vista.
Vista doesn't do reinstall in place... it's abbreviated R.I.P. for a reason. What vista does is basically an upgrade: It installs install a clean copy of Windows and moves all of your programs and profiles to the new copy.

Sometimes you just can't do it tho: It wouldn't work on my desktop because I have my user profiles on D: and there's not nearly enough room on C: to back up the old system and profiles to c:\windows.old.

[leetmasterjames.livejournal.com]

So what your saying is there is a very similar method of doing the same thing but didn't see that it was important to make this information readily available. Lovely, I wonder what other tools I have yet to find?