Inattentive, less than forthcoming, and contradictory technical support personnel are rapidly replacing taxi drivers as my least favorite group to do business with.
Apparently, either the system isn’t seeing my hard drive and I can fix this by reseating the actual physical drive and doing a system reset (tech #1) which has worked off and on for the two weeks since this problem started, or my hard drive is just dead and needs to be replaced (tech #2).
So, I have a new hard drive coming, which I’ll have to pay for if I don’t send back my old hard drive (WTF? If it’s dead, why do you need it?).
I have a little bet going with myself:I think the problem is XP Service Pak 2. Given that I didn’t start having these problems until after I installed it I think this is the case. I think the new hard drive is going to show up and maybe it’ll work, and maybe it won’t.
Occam would tell us that the problem is that the hard drive is failing, but William of Occam never had to deal with Bill Gates.
Uh-oh – I could believe it’s Service Pak 2. In the computer support world, the simplest approach to a problem and the first question asked is, “Have you changed anything?” There ya go.
I’ve disabled automatic MS upgrades for the moment, but I suppose I’ll have to begin again at some (dreaded) point. Feh. Well, at least I don’t use IE or Outlook.
Good luck.