I got up early Monday and went over to our church to help count the offering from Sunday. I got there and they were complaining that they couldn't print to any of their printers and couldn't get on the internet. To top that, someone had wiped out the laptop that is used to project the songs onto a screen in church services. I got done counting the money and went to see if I could find the recovery disk for the laptop and of course I couldn't. I did find a recovery disk for another computer so that was the best I could do. I grabbed the recovery disk, the Microsoft Office disk, and the MediaShout (used for projecting the songs and sermon slides) and headed home since the internet at church is very slow.
I got home and grabbed a bite to eat and then started the process of rebuilding the laptop. The recovery disk worked okay as far as getting XP back on the laptop but of course it did not have the correct drivers for the laptop since it was a recovery disk for another computer. I began the long process of downloading all the drivers from Dell (luckily, if you go to Dell and type in the service tag it will tell you which drivers you need....well almost all:) ) By that time I had to go back to church to see if I could get the internet switch to work. I finally got it working but really didn't do anything except turn it off and on, which I had done several times before and it hadn't made a difference.
I got back home and started installing the drivers and finally got everything working as far as XP after downloading service pack 3 along with some other updates. I then installed Microsoft Office.....thankfully there was no problems there even though I think there's a service pack that I still need to download and install. I installed MediaShout and then had to download and install 2 updates for it along with doing some configuration to it. I finally quit a 9:00 PM and called it a day. It wouldn't be so bad except the whole problem was caused by someone trying to do something they don't know how to do. Whew!!!!!!!!!. I still have some stuff to do but I'm getting close.
4 comments:
My sympathies go out to you on this one. Aren't most problems caused by people doing things they are not supposed to do or not doing things they are supposed to do? I'm dealing with something similar at church right this very minute. Similar in scope, not in exact problem. I find myself weary at times for spending A LOT OF TIME (as you did) fixing a problem that someone else cause by either doing or not doing what they were supposed to do.
All we can do is politely smile and go on.
Why won't people ask!
At school in the lab the kids would constantly change things or mess things up and I was so happy when we installed Deep Freeze - it was so nice knowing at the end of the day I didn't have to fix anything.
You put in a lot of time Neal on this. Hope everyone appreciates your dedication.
And after you get that done, I start asking you questions!
At least it didn't crash 20 minutes before the service. Had that happen.
When I was teaching computers I learned to swap out an HD and keep lecturing.
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