Mind over Geek Squad

          Monday January 5, 2015 nothing invigorates me more than solving a problem that someone or many other some ones have been unable to figure out. On January 1 we went to Rhett’s mother Jane’s home for a new year’s celebration. His mom told me her Dell laptop had died. She took it to Best Buy to have one of the Geek Squad boys there look at it. He told her she needed a new disk drive. He said it would cost about $200 to put one in for her. He also suggested she could trade in her laptop and get some discount on one of their refurbished laptops with a 90 day warranty. She declined and left the store. She asked if I would take a look at it. I said of course I would. The laptop started up and then gave a short list of error messages which I did not recognize. I shut it down and then restarted hoping to get to the point where I could select a pared down startup in hope that I could bypass the error on the startup sequence. I got the same error message, but there was a feature displayed for access to the onboard recovery partition. That partition was supposed to restore the operating system and all of the user data. When I started that and the machine took off running I knew the disk drive was ok. The laptop ran for about two hours or more shuffling things around. When it completed it restarted and BAM it was ready to go. 

          That was the good part. The bad part was it did not recover the user data. I at that point could see the recovery partition, but the Dell would not allow access to it. Jane said she had an automatic backup on a site called Mozy. I dialed that up, but it was getting errors on the page. It turned out the Mozy internet site was down for the next two days. When Jane tried to go back on line to Mozy, her Microsoft internet explorer gave her a message that her browser was not up to date and it needed to be updated before she could access the site. I went back over to her house and tried to update the web browser, but windows update said it could not be updated even though on the first of January it had updated 81 different updates. So I had her download Google Chrome browser. Then her internet worked faster and with no flaws. 

          Jane had gotten in touch with Mozy on Saturday the third of January and the tech there gave her a link to get her to the site’s file download manager. I clicked on the download and installed the file manager program and got into the site. I know I could have sat and read all the instructions which would have meant little to me without seeing the site itself, so I just dove in and started clicking to see what happened where. I finally found the hidden button that would download everything, all 14.5 gigabytes. 

         Jane has a fast 4-G connection, but as in so many cases, the web site’s speed for downloading is much slower. It took nearly 8 hours to download all of the data. I could download a single file in less than a heartbeat, but when everything was selected for download the site would throttle way back. Once it was all downloaded, parts of the user data were scattered all over in places that did not make sense to me, but I got it sorted and in the place where she could utilize it easily. It was a difficult task, but was very enjoyable to solve a problem the Geek Squad could not or would not. I don’t have much to brag about these days, but on this I am tooting my horn as I am quite proud of Mind over Geek Squad.