Doug's Dynamic Drivel

This weekend my laptop had a total meltdown on the drive and I lost all my data (may still find a way to get it back – yet to be determined) due to a combination of a Windows update gone bad (first one in 14 years) and the incomplete removal of Linux (Grub boot loader remained.) For whatever reason the .net framework update completely munged on my computer and in doing so it wiped out the MBR (master boot record). Now normally that’s not a big deal you simply put in the Windows CD and install a new one. However in this case when I did that the install CD (which is a volume license CD from work) blue screened part way through its start up each time I tried. I assumed it was a faulty CD (It’s a copy because the original is a volume license CD) so I resorted to Plan B – insert my BootitNG CD and tell it to create a new MBR. Did this but uh oh on reboot I still got the GRUB screen which should not have been there and it was trying to boot Ubuntu which was not on the system any longer nor was the partition nit was in still there even. No matter what I did I could not get a standard generic MBR installed and so there was no way to get into XP

Now I need a Windows computer for work and I needed to be at work this morning so I thought well screw the data I’ll go buy a copy of Vista and install it. Off to the only local store open on a Sunday that sells that – Wal-Mart (ugh) plunk down my card and drive home only to discover the clueby at Wally World had sold me the upgrade edition which would not install because it could not read that XP was already installed due to the missing MBR (interesting that ) and I kept getting the message to forst load my OS then upgrade – sigh. Back to Wally-World and ask for the full version only to discover that the price of that soon to be outdated OS was practically 50% the price of a brand new laptop of fairly decent quality.

Enter my new HP G60-439CA

Well I’m back up and running and if I can get XP installed on the old one I might still retrieve my data as I have XP backups on an external USB drive but Vista does not know what to do with them. I want this data as it has all my digital pictures from day one. But it is what it is and that teaches me not to use backup software to back stuff up but just go for cheap storage and do it bit for bit for stuff I can’t lose.

Anyway to the title of this post. The one thing that had me sweating bullets was the loss of Quicken. Now I regularly back it up to an external USB drive and when I bought Quicken 2009 I saved the downloaded install file to that same drive. So after I got my new laptop up and running I went to reinstall Quicken from the saved file and uh oh I got file corruption errors. After buying the laptop I have no funds left to buy yet another copy of Quicken – especially since they forced me to upgrade just two months ago when they expired online banking in my 2006 version. So I visited their site and contacted their email support team, explained my problem, used all the same contact info I had used when buying from them and waited hopefully for a positive response. That was late yesterday afternoon and this morning I received an email from them with a link to download a fresh version of the install file, no questions asked. It installed perfectly and I was able to import my data from the 2 day old backup with no problems at all. So I want to take this opportunity to really thank Intuit software and the Quicken team for coming to my rescue like that. I’ve been a Quicken customer since the mid 90′s and I will stay one for as long as I can now. It’s the best money manager out there and that was tremendous customer service.

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