Years ago, I was low person on the totem pole on Team Toshiba. We were a group of intrepid souls who did tech support for Toshiba America in their CompuServe Forum. Since I had neither the time, the money nor
the inclination to be a cutting-edge tech geek, my role was to find answers for people like me who were still slogging along two operating systems behind and five generations of computers ago.
I was then, as I am now, a firm advocate of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” While my Team members were avidly pursuing Microsoft’s latest questionable goodies, I toodled merrily along with what worked.
And maybe because those guys were constantly tearing their hair out trying to get stuff to work, while I suggested “Gee, you know, if you went back to Windows for Workgroups…” I took a good deal of heat now and again. Most of it was good-natured. Some…  not so much.
One of the real techno-weenies called me Mesozoic Marte. I don’t think he meant it kindly. But I thought it was funny and adopted the name quite readily. I even have a picture of me, standing next to a bronze Triceratops at the LA Natural History Museum, and I’d post it here if it didn’t show me 50 pounds heavier than I am today. I’m Mesozoic but I’m also somewhat vain, what can I say. 🙂
Why did I get to talking about this? Well, because I haven’t changed my ways. I tend to stick with what works until either there’s some program I really really really want that won’t run under the operating system that I have, or the operating system itself gets too cranky to deal with. Such was the situation this past week when I finally gave up on Windows 2000 and installed XP Pro.
All did not go well.
Despite all kinds of articles claiming that XP Pro will happily upgrade over Win2K, it didn’t, quite. I had extremely annoying problems with my DVD burner that no amount of helpful advice would clear up. Everything else worked, as far as I could tell, but the fact that the DVD drive was brain dead was a major problem, because I had stuff backed up on data DVDs that I couldn’t restore. Aaaargh.
Well, to make a long and frustrating story short, late this afternoon, I finally threw in the towel, whipped out my Acronis bootable disk, wiped the stupid hard drive clean and started all over from the beginning.
And of course, once you do that, you’ really only HAVE begun. Now I get to reinstall all my software. Thank goodness for Foxmarks so at least I got all my bookmarks back post haste.
I bet this provides me with material for upcoming posts for a good long time.
photo credit: prad2609
