OT: Dell support

[Laura Brody]

Quoting Bill Campbell <bill at celestial.com>:

> On Fri, Apr 06, 2007, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> >Quoting Richard Kreiss (Fri, 6 Apr 2007 10:44:49 -0400):
> >[...]
> >> I think I need to set up a community training course on how to backup
> >> ones computer.  Granted most people won't do it anyway.
> >
> >"Backup?  What's a backup?"
>
> As usual User Friendly's on top of this.  See yesterday and
> today's strips:
>
> 	http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070405
>
> 	http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070406
>
> >True story...  (Back in the days when Win98 was still shiny.)
> >
> >Laura's cousin's computer crashed.  The drive contained all of his
> >business data.  Naturally, he didn't have any backups.  We managed
> >to restore his system, along with all of his data.  For Xmas that
> >year, we gave him a tape backup drive.  We offered to install it
> >for him, but he said he'd do that himself.
> >
> >Fast forward several months...
> >
> >His computer crashes again.  Can he restore from his tape backups?
> >No, he never installed the tape drive.  Well, we recover the data
> >once again.  This time, we install the tape drive and make a backup
> >for him.

  The story continues. His computer dies again. The last (and
only) back up was the one *we* made for him a few months earlier.
The hard drive is toast and we can't recover a thing..... so we
give him another hard drive and restore the backup that we made
for him.

  Fast forward a few years....
  About a year ago, he gives me an XP desktop to clean up. He
used for about 6 months and it probably has some infections.

  Well....this was the most infected system I ever had to
deal with, hands down, nothing even comes close.... It took
over 15 minutes to just boot. Every well-known virus, spyware
and keylogger know to man was on this computer. When I had
Ad-Aware sweep the system, I thought that the computer was
locked up because it didn't update the screen at all during the
30+ minutes to remove the several thousands of infections that
it found. Ditto for Spysweeper. There was no firewall,
anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc. on this computer, no Windows
updates and the desktop was covered with icons to internet
poker sites. He had no backup, of course. If he wasn't
family, I would have fired him as a customer a long time ago.
Instead, I clean up his messes for free.....

> Was he a Harvard man (you can always tell a Harvard man -- but not much).

  Actually, he went to Columbia in NYC, but I think that
you may have something there.....

--
Laura Brody
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