Well Charles, I just had a pleasant (though highly OT) epiphany I thought I would share with you.
The Windows XP registry on my wife's computer became corrupted for the usual unknown and unknowable reasons. The rescue CD said "The following hives are missing from the target registry: SOFTWARE". Oh. Just all the applications gone, along with Windows itself. No biggie. Our customers come first. Fortunately, the Winternals Inc. recovery CD, which actually runs itself off a bootable but crippled copy of Windows 2000, allowed me to operate Nero and burn a CD with all her personal data on it. So nothing actually good was lost, just stuff written by Microsoft.
I hadn't rebuilt that machine for about 3 years anyway, so I went into my usual CPU-video-motherboard-fan-memory-soundcard trance, mentally designing her a new one, and viscerally dreading the 1.5 days I would spend assembling, loading and configuring it.
Then I saw the light in the form of That Mantra Which Gives Men Waves Of Relief: F*ck This Sh*t. I'm not Monica Lewinsky. I'm too old and too wealthy to be on my knees under a desk with a screwdriver and cpu fans and round cables.
So I just went online and ordered her a brand spanking new 17" iMac G5....the approach to the problem that ANY SANE PERSON WOULD TAKE.
Mac Office 2004 will read all her .doc files and Excel spreadsheets, and we'll get her rescued mail into Entourage one way or the other. The machine will be here in a month, there's a lot of demand for them right now.
Boy, do I feel good!
--QS |
