Worth telling this, I guess .....
Bloke bought a system last week. We went for Win 8 with Classic Shell and ObjectDock. User is wedded to Outlook, has an Office 10 pro licence.
So we fiddled about for a long time doing the data transfer from his old beast - a Pentium IV 1700, would you believe! I used my office machine for the transfer from his twin IDE drives to my big SATA drive, then plugged the user's new 2TB SATA into my machine to copy stuff across to there. (Can't go direct because the old girl doesn't have SATA and the new one doesn't have IDE. My workshop machine - by design - has both.)
PROBLEM!
I set the new beast up to use AHCI, on the theory that it will be faster and with native support in Win 8, trouble-free. (I never, ever enable AHCI on XP 'cause there s no native support for it.) Copied the data over onto the new drive no worries .... but the new machine can't read it! So far as the new machine is concerned, the 150GB of data I just copied onto the drive does not exist! Turn off AHCI and it can't boot! Plug the new drive back into my machine, it is all there. Anyway, I pulled my own drive out and connected it up to the new machine in an external USB caddy. Slow but it worked, eventually.
Did all the Windows updates, installed assorted third-party browsers and such like as usual. Transferred the Outlook data, got the account working OK to receive, set it correctly to send - can't test directly because it's physically connected to my cable rig, not his satellite dish, but so far as I can tell, all set right. Retrieved the keys and unregistered his stupid Trend Micro AV, installed it on the new box. Tested. That was last week.
This week the machine is back. He's been onto his ISP support desk, and they have screwed it horribly. Apparently he had some sort of problem, presumably sending mail 'cause I know for a fact he could receive OK. For some reason completely incomprehensible to me, they have "fixed" that by:
- 1: Switching him from Microsoft Outlook 2010 to whatever that pox-ridden toy email Metro app is called.
- 2: Telling him that the system won't work because "Windows 8 doesn't do POP3". (Which is rubbish, he is using Outlook, not Metrotoymail.)
- 3: Failing to explain how the hell an inability to use POP3 can cause a problem with sending email!
- 4: Failing to explain how it is possible for them, a 21st century ISP, to offer an email service that does not include IMAP as well as POP and SMTP. (Which is what they claimed.)
- 5: Further failing to explain how their "IMAP non-capable" mail server could, in fact, collect its mail perfectly well using IMAP, as I saw for myself before the system ever left the building!
- 6: Requiring him, to set up a new live.com/hotmail account which he doesn't like, use, or understand, and which does not contain any of his mail 'cause it's not the address all his friends have.
- 7: probably some other rubbish I forget
Making it all worse, his idiot son (20-something but none the brighter for all that) has been playing, and we are now booting into Metro and all the stupid live tiles are flashing away like mad and his internet bill is
huge already.
But that's not all: Windows 8, for reasons best known to itself, has started downloading updates for Office. Now I religiously do all the Windows updates, browser updates, Flash player, Java, media players, AV software updates, the lot. But I didn't think to do Office updates 'cause (a) who cares anyway? and (b) I so seldom see MS Office outside of the corporates these days that I tend to forget about it. (Most people seem to have switched to Open Office or Google Docs - presumably 'cause they don't like the stupid interface in Office 2007 and up.) Anyway, Windows 8, apparently without being told, started getting every damn Office 2010 update. More data use charges for my mate! We are talking serious dollars now - satellite providers charge for data as though they had to dole it out in a solid gold teaspoon.
It gets worse: some of the updates failed to install, so they looped, around and around and around. He tries to deal with this by individually hand-installing 28 different updates.
Anyway, I looked at the machine today. It turns out that there were three issues:
1: Office 10 Service Pack 1 hangs on install. I tried downloading the standalone installer, same thing. This turns out to be a Trend Micro AV bug. Turn off Trend Micro and it installs fine.
2: Two or three different One Note update bugs clog up the install and make it fail. One at a time I find them and tell the stupid update program to ignore them and never to mention them in polite company again. Hell, neither my customer nor I even know what One Note is! Well, I know that it's some useless thing which no-one uses and it comes with some of the Office versions and I remember looking it up once just to see what it did and what it was good for (turned out to be nothing, or at least nothing worth remembering).
3: Outlook account settings borked. Some fiddling, and not a little swearing at the asinine ribbon UI "feature" which is primarily designed to make obvious functions difficult to find, results in a working mail system again. Partly because it's brute-force simple and I like brute-force simple, partly because this is a customer who likes simple and isn't good at complex or subtle computer stuff, but mostly just to stick it up the moron ISP help desk who said Windows 8 doesn't do POP3, I set it up to use POP. Works perfectly, of course.
But then again, it worked perfectly when I sent it out last week. Who knows what next week will bring?
