UtterlyBoring.com

As I mentioned earlier, I’m shopping around getting quotes for computers and a server. After it’s all said and done, HP is looking like the best deal/service (and the sales rep from them spoke English, which is always an added perk considering the Dell rep didn’t very well). They also have a deal going on until the end of the month that with certain configurations, you can get a free 15″ LCD. One of those configurations is without Microsoft Office, instead with MS Works (which is an ugly little suite for business use), so I need to get some licenses for MS Office Pro or Small Business Edition 2003.

Anybody know where to get them cheap? I need either of those two versions because they come with Publisher as well, which was requested by the folks there for some basic in-house desktop publishing duties. I actually have the CD for the MS Office Pro edition as well as for Publisher 2003, I just need more licenses. So if anybody has four of them to sell/get rid of, by all means e-mail me (and Publisher I probably don’t need four for, probably just two of the Pro/SBE licenses and two Office Basic licenses).

I’m truly convinced that technology is out to get me. I’ve spent more time today than I’d care to admit working on a co-worker’s computer, trying to get it working right. She needed a new cooling fan on her processor, as well as a case fan, and she wanted a new hard drive (because her old one was having fits and was too small). I had all the parts, so she brought it in for me to install everything. Got the new heatsink installed, the new fan, and the new HD, and then ran Ghost to copy the data from one drive to another. Booted it up, and we were good to go. Total time, about 90 minutes.

I should’ve boxed the thing up and handed it to my co-worker right there, but I made the mistake of asking if she needed anything else. She pointed out an error message that was popping up on boot, and after a quick Google search, I found out it was a driver issue, so I downloaded the new driver, installed it, rebooted, and then the computer wouldn’t boot into Windows (this system is running Windows 98, which is another problem entirely). So I booted it into safe mode, tried to uninstall the driver, didn’t see anything in Add/Remove Programs, so I went hunting around in device manager for the culprit. Thought I found it, removed it and set it back to the Windows/Microsoft default driver, and rebooted. Still wouldn’t get into Windows. So I tried booting off a DOS disk, and copying the old data from the old hard drive onto the new hard drive again (which should, in theory, revert everything back to normal, right?). No dice at all. So tomorrow, I’m going to just reinstall Windows and go from there.

What’s even worse? The system is an old Dell, so that should tell me something about my problem from yesterday. Neither HP or Dell have gotten back to me with a solid quote, so I’m still waiting on them.

I’m really starting to get frustrated with technology. Yes, it pays the bills and puts food on the table for my family, but there are times like this where I really just wish I wasn’t good at this sort of thing so I wasn’t always relied upon to fix it. Life would be a lot easier if I was actually good enough at something else to pay the bills.

Update on 5/18: Read the comments. Everything’s up and functional again.