Blue Screen of Death

I am writing to you now after much difficulties getting back up and running.  A few weeks ago, I started having some issues with my hard drive.  I would get a cryptic error message of Raid(0) in my system tray followed by sporadic Blue Screens of Death.  That is not a good combination, I assure you. When I looked it up on the web, it gave an ominous tone that the drive was failing.  You can play Russian Roulette daily and see what happens or you can take the steps to try to move on.  

Fortunately, I had both a backpack drive and also had subscribed to Carbonite backup so I knew I had backup.  However, neither one backed up my programs, only my data.  Further, I had nothing that backed up my operating system.  Sony in its infinite wisdom decided not to ship recovery disks.  The web site gave very little instruction on how to actually create recovery disks.  So I had two wonderful experiences with Sony (lol).  One was I called customer service and asked to order recovery CD’s.  After giving both my product ID and my serial number, the customer service agent said that she still could not get a part number and I would have to ask a manager override the next business day.  I then tried the chat window in customer support.  They give you 15 minutes “free” (I am out of warranty) before charging you to help.  After farting around for 20 minutes (you know chat sessions – they spend 20 minutes just messing around), she sends me a link that allows me to create recovery CD’s.  Problem was it did not match what was showing on my computer.  However, she did offer to help me FOR FREE if I would sign up for an annual support plan.  I was somewhat curt and told her that I have no desire to compensate Sony for having me backup my own operating system.  So I looked through all of the nice Sony videos and there was a link buried in one of them with how to create recovery CD’s.  I’m in business and was able to create recovery CD’s. 
The next day, I stop at the Geek squad and have them swap out drives.  After mentioning my wonderful experience with Sony they parenthetically commented “Sony does stuff like that”.  I should also mention that to swap the drives according to Sony’ web site would have cost me $680.  I bought two drives for $200 as my notebook actually has two drive bays.  Geek squad was wonderful.  There is actually good customer service in this world if you look hard enough. 

So eagerly with anticipation I go back to my office and try to recover from my CD’s.  NO GO!  Sony keeps thinking I am recovering onto the original hard drive.  Do they not think that hard drives fail.  Well to make a very long story short, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 rather than trying to upgrade.  This set me back $80 more than if I had bought the upgrade version, but at least I have the peace of mind that I actually own the operating system and not some cryptic recovery process. 

My report card -
Sony – F
Circuit City/Best Buy - B+
Spoorts – C- for stupidity, but A+ for diligence.

But I am up and running after spending all day Saturday reloading programs.  I would like to add another blog post on actually the good process of weeding out all of your junk you accumulate on your computer over time but enough for now.