Sassafrass & Coffee

The laptop. Bane of my existence.

I’m pretty handy with desktops, but when it comes to laptops, I’m almost helpless. They’re small. They’re fragile. They’re complicated. And you can’t quite open them up and play around with their guts like you can a tower. I’m kind of an oaf when it comes to hardware. I like to pretend my problem solving skills consist of “WHAM, BAM, SLAP!” and things work. Sadly, I can’t use this technique on the more sophisticated, expensive equipment I deal with at my office.

A little background on what I do, for starters? I work for a European scientific laser distributor. It’s more of a family business these days, and requires a certain diversity to skill and ability. The job itself is a very…rewarding one; I am constantly being tested and constantly learning new things from the scientific research world to the simple office world. I do multiple jobs, and I am always expected to learn something new in order to make things run a little more smoothly for my company. I take pride in what I do, not just for the things I do there, but for the abilities I learn on the way.

One of my dozens of jobs is tech support. This ranges from almost anything electronic to anything mechanical. Of course, I try to steer clear of any actual systems as I am not a physicist, nor do I have the right tools to do any of those higher-end jobs. One of the many things I do is work on all software, networking, and hardware issues within the office.

Recently, a laptop died out of nowhere. Well, not out of nowhere. The thing was being used daily for six years. It was bound to die at any time – and I recommended that the owner get something new – fast. Of course, like all things, it got put on the back burner until the need actually arose.

I’ve been fixing peoples’ computers for going-on-four-weeks-straight at the office. Not just work computers, but personal computers. The great part is that I can tell these people that “I am not a professional, I can’t promise I’ll fix this.” But every time, I get the job done. I hate to pat myself on the back here, but it’s never something I thought I would be able to do. Of course, I have Chris to help me out when I am stuck, but he has maybe a 15% input ratio to the problems I’ve come up against.

So, when a laptop died, I thought nothing of the owner demanding I come with him to purchase a new one. As you may know, almost everything you buy retail these days comes with Microsoft Vista on it – what a shitty OS, let me tell you. I figured “hey, no problem, I can just reformat the laptop once I buy it and throw XP on there.” Ha ha ha, mistake. No one wanted to deal with Vista at the office, myself included. I figured there wouldn’t much of a problem reformatting to XP. I’ve never really seen a problem with downgrading before. But oooo boy, was I in for a TREAT!

Turns out that none of the drivers for the newest hardware in the laptop were supported by anything but Vista. Need an Ethernet driver? Yea, so you can’t have one on this laptop unless you’re running VISTA! Ha ha ha, BURN. And when the printer drivers and things were concerned, the reverse happened. HP hasn’t put out Vista drivers for certain models. My luck, the owner has one of those printers.

So ugh. I am at a loss. I am working at 8:30pm on a Friday night in the office, sitting with my face in my hands, canceling my plans to go out. I had to buy another copy of Vista and install it. And even then, only half the drivers were in there.

Long story short, I eventually caught up and was able to go home and relax quietly for the evening.

Little did I know this new laptop would bite at my heels for days on end. The Microsoft Office CD key I have used up all its installs. The wifi card inside wasn’t performing as I expected it to. I troubleshot these problems over the weekend, upgraded (or downgraded – which ever you prefer) him to all freeware to replace Office, since I am trying to save the company hundreds of dollars on useless software that costs and arm and a leg. (Really, I love Mozilla and OpenOffice products. You should save yourself some money and try them out – maybe kick ‘em a few bucks while you’re at it for their awesome job.)

This all seems to be working out fine. I had done a massive hard drive back-up on this particular laptop back in March. I explained to the user that I won’t be able to recover his files between March and the present without putting a lot more time into the project – was this alright. (Because people need their laptops, I imagine)

He agreed, and said he just wanted to have the older files re-instated. Fine. Wonderful.

Until today, when he came panicked into my office, worried about an upcoming meeting in Germany he needs to attend. He needs those files on his laptop! Well, the laptop is fine and dead. I ask for the laptop to see if I can get any power out of it – see what it’s doing. Maybe I can flash drive some stuff over to his new laptop.

Turns out you can get this $20 external USB 2.0 hard drive encasement for 2.5″ drives. I had a hard time swallowing it at first – could this problem seriously be so easily resolved??

Turns out it’s just that easy. I couldn’t believe it. I had to demolish the case for the hard drive which came out of the laptop with a bunch of needless plastic and dumb shit on it.

Presently, I have the laptop set up on my kitchen table, wiring old emails from the old hard drive onto the new laptop into Outlook. And from Outlook (which is installed – I just have maybe 20 more accesses to it left) I will import into Thunderbird. It’s tedious work, I tell you.

But damn is it good to be self-reliant and useful to others.