Upgrading Frustrations
I’m a little frustrated right now.
A little over 1 year ago we purchased a TB drive to back up all our documents and pictures as the computer drives were not big enough for that kind of storage anymore. About a year ago, the drive failed to connect to the computer anymore. After a frustrating series of emails with Iomega, it was realized that, although the hard drive was receiving power, it was not receiving enough power and a new power cord was sent to the house. Drive repaired, data safe . . all is well. Now part of my computer upgrade was to move the TB drive over to the new computer. It didn’t read. Hmmm, Windows7 doesn’t read this drive? No sweat at this point because I can still plug it into my old system and pull the important files over right? Wrong, now the old system doesn’t read it either. I’ve tried new cords (fire wire) and different USB plugs (in case the one’s I was using have gone bad), but no success. The drive appears to be getting power . . but is it getting enough power? This is something that I can’t answer and I can’t write Iomega until I go through their ENTIRE checklist for setup. . . again. Needless to say, there is a reason I’m not thrilled with Iomega. What’s really sad is when we were looking at purchasing the separate hard drive we opted for Iomega instead of the other brands because we’d known their products to be quality products . .which this experience has totally derailed.
I have a stack of software that I’ve been working my way back through installing. One of the pieces is Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) and it has given me notice that it is not compatible with Windows7. However, DNS wants me to know that their 10.0 works with Windows7. Sigh. Research on the internet tells me that if I go into the program itself and alter it then I can trick it into being compatible rather than purchasing an upgrade.
Additionally, we had purchased an HP All-in-one printer/fax/copier/scanner a year or so back. Once again, we went for a brand name that I’d not had any problems with. Until this product. Within a few months the printer had problems with “Ink System Failure”, which I found out with research was a fairly common problem with this model. Reboots fixed the problem . . for a time . . then about 12 months ago it decided it wasn’t going to work at all. Now this problem is keeping it from connecting to the computer so we can use the scanning function. When the problem first started, we were in the UK and talking with the HP reps was not feasible . . now it looks like I’ll be making a call and spending some time on the phone.
On the plus side, the rest of the installations have gone really well and have worked out to provide me a better system overall. If I can get the rest of the hardware to cooperate then I will be unstoppable. (smile) This process has had another benefit in that all the wires and peripherals that were connected every which way and cluttering my desktop have now been put to rights so that things look a little neater and more orderly.
Dafydd has equally been having difficulty. His computer’s HD had reached capacity and so we looked, for curiosity’s sake at a new hard drive for him. It was reasonably priced and so, on impulse, it was purchased. At first we thought of slaving the drive and copying the information over and/or putting the OS on it later. There wasn’t any reference on how to slave it or any pin jumpers to perform such a thing. So, we put it in as the primary and tried to load Windows7 on it. This was not successful because it was an upgrade program from Windows XP so he needed to load XP. We let it run overnight and it worked. But it needed to do updates before it could install Windows7 and it wasn’t reading the network card. After finding the right factory disk with the controllers on it, we got the system to recognize the network card and therefore the internet to do it’s installs. Then Windows7 was loaded and programs have been slowly started to be reinstalled. Overall, this process has taken him almost 24 hours of frustration. This week I know that I’ll be spending some time researching how to slave his old drive so that he can still have access to his information.
At this point, we both have space on our HD’s for all the info we had put on the TB drive to “save it” so once we get the TB drive working again, I think we’ll be transferring everything over and bidding the TB drive farewell before it can fail and keep our data permanently.
I’ve realized this weekend that I need to turn my laptop over to Best Buy’s Geek Squad in the next week or so in order to try and get it’s myriad of problems fixed under their “warranty”. Thankfully, my mother got me a Passport drive for my birthday which successfully backed up all my data and now with the new desktop I can transfer the data over and verify it’s viability before handing the laptop over to, perhaps, never see it again.
Isn’t the age of technology awesome?