Tech Support – Family & Friends

On the Straight-Talking Java forum, Miles Parker mentioned helping friends with “computer” issues.

I rarely dread calls more than from not-so-tech-savvy friends and family. Not because I don’t want to help, on the contrary. But more because of the myriad ways that Windows and Windows apps can become spectacularly fouled up down in the bowels of the machine.

Sometimes the issue is trying to figure out what happened that caused their entire year of their small business financials to disappear. Coincidentally after Windows did an auto-update — and I suspect auto re-boot during a long-running backup process. (BTW: data was lost.)

Or how my own out-facing network address made it to the spam blocker list which in turn caused my own outbound email to sporadically fail with strange messages! Thanks girls… glad you found those wonderful trojan viruses that were spamming from one of your machines! I made the firewall and virus protection tighter.

Now on to migrate over a desktop PC to an iMac — xfer email address book, personal files, etc. Should be loads of fun. After all, I just made a first pass at exporting Address Book from Outlook and it said the Export feature was not installed. Yikes, I’ll have to break out the original install disks.

I’ll let you know how it goes!