Posts Tagged ‘PC’

I made a lot of mistakes this week that cost me precious time and money. The thing that led me down the path to severe stress was Windows 7. I (mistakenly) listened to a friend who said he had been running Windows 7 (beta) for months and it was very stable. I thought that since he usually distains anything Microsoft (in spite of working there), it must be pretty good. I had no real reason to upgrade from Windows XP…I just thought I’d go ahead and take my friend’s offer of a company discount to get it ($40) and install it now. I didn’t do any research, so I’m writing this as a precautionary tale so others don’t follow in my footsteps.

I did a custom install of Windows 7 Professional, as directed by the upgrade advisor. What I didn’t know is that it wasn’t a clean install and took up a good portion of my hard drive. All my other files and software were still there on the hard drive taking up space, but I wasn’t able to access them. I tried installing my Adobe products first since it was a priority to get up and running again for my freelance business. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough hard drive space left to do so.

Frustrated, I decided to go to Best Buy and get a new computer. I needed more memory anyway and they had some good deals. I settled on an HP p6230y…750 GB hard drive space and 8 GB DDR3 SDRam, and quad-core processor. Perfect for my graphic design work. Cost: close to $750.

When I got home, I quickly set up my new computer and started installing software. The MS Office installed without a hitch, as expected. The problems began when I tried to install Adobe CS3 Design Standard and Web Standard. They installed fine, actually…it wasn’t until I tried to run them that I had problems. They would never open up even though the task manager showed them running, and eventually would give an error message and crash.

Ok, so now I did a bit of research. Seems I would have to upgrade my Windows 7 64-bit Home edition to the Professional edition. The upgrade was necessary because it was the only way to be able to run applications in Windows XP mode in Virtual PC. But here’s a kicker…I couldn’t use the Pro version my friend purchased for me. The only way Microsoft would allow me to upgrade was to use the Upgrade Anytime option and purchase the upgrade to get the install key (which is different from the product key one usually gets with the software). So, another $89 spent.

I also had to purchase upgrades to some of my business software (Quickbooks and Extensis Fusion (for font management) because my current versions didn’t runn on Win 7 (another $100, roughly).

I installed the upgrade, followed by the software for XP mode and virtual PC. Then I had to install the Adobe software (again) while in XP mode. Ok, I can do this…not that big of a deal, right? Wrong! Once I was in XP mode, the resolution was only 16-bit with no way to change it to anything higher. I just can’t have that considering the type of business I’m in! Even worse, I couldn’t access files on the Win 7 part of the computer from XP mode. In frustration, I contacted Microsoft support and got an “expert” in Win 7. I gave him control of my computer and he started trying things I had already tried. He wasn’t any more successful changing the resolution or setting up a network for file sharing than I was. Almost a whole day wasted to find this out!

Oh, I forgot to mention the waste of time chatting online with someone from HP and Adobe…useless to the point I wanted to scream!

I finally went to Adobe’s site and download CS4 versions of the software I use most and installed it on Win 7. It worked! But, in less than 30 days, I’ll need to buy the upgrades for the two suites to the tune of $898 plus tax!

One final straw in this whole fiasco is that I run a backup of my files every night to an external hard drive. I checked to make sure all the folders were there before ditching my old computer. What I didn’t check is the contents of each folder. Many of the files are missing, which is really weird. That will teach me not to thoroughly check my backups before switching computers!!

When I finally purchase the Adobe upgrades later this month, I will have spent around $1900…and that doesn’t count the time I could have been billing clients (about 2 1/2 days worth).

Lessons learned:

1) Research OS upgrades and new computers before rushing in hastily

2) Never buy a new computer right when a new OS has been released…allow time for the bugs to be worked out.

3) I never thought I’d say this, but…I’ll be buying a Mac in the future. (I’m now a real believer of those Mac commercials – see video below).