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Old May 11th 17, 06:07 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
PeterN[_6_]
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Posts: 4,254
Default For those Who Care to Play: Acros SOOC + RAF

On 5/11/2017 11:49 AM, Bill W wrote:
On Thu, 11 May 2017 08:39:24 -0400, PeterN
wrote:

On 5/11/2017 1:48 AM, Bill W wrote:
On Thu, 11 May 2017 01:24:58 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Bill W
wrote:

Well, I finally got my photo computer working again a little after I
hung up on MS customer support, and a little before I reached the bomb
threat level of frustration with them.

what does it take to move beyond threat level and actually carry it
out?

After they told me I had to pay them to tell me how to fix the problem
that *their* update caused, I was at the tipping point... And this was
after I told them exactly what was wrong - a munged boot sector. "Oh,
well at this level 1 customer support, no one knows anything about
MBR's and those things. You have to get that info at level 2, our paid
service".

customer support is mostly useless, and at the larger companies, they
just want to get you off the phone because they're rated on number of
calls.

It's almost exactly like ransomware, except that a lot of Googling
came up with a fix. About 10 commands (bootrec & diskpart commands)
typed into the command line - really about 60 seconds if you type
fast, and it's fixed. The ridiculous part is that the Windows
install/recovery files (Media creation files) come out differently
depending on whether you choose to write them to a USB drive, or to a
DVD. Some tools are missing in the USB version, and a couple of the
commands fail, the critical one being bcdboot.

welcome to windows.

One of the last things I said to them was, " I guess this is why
people move to Apple". It might be a couple of years, but next time I
think I need something new, I will be looking at them for the first
time.

macs don't care if they're booted from internal or external drive,
whether it's usb, firewire, thunderbolt or sata. as long as the system
on the drive is compatible with the mac, it will boot, without any
changes necessary. they can even boot and install macos over the
internet to a blank hard drive.

there is also a recovery partition, which is automatically installed
(and is used for more than just recovery), so you don't actually need a
separate emergency boot disk.

All stuff I didn't know, but that points to the usual stumbling block
- I'd have to learn a new system. I'm old...


Actually there is not all that much difference, if you are just using
some apps. nospam is trying to start a tools war. Please don't feed him.
I'm afraid that I already bet, but will not go further.


I have some past exposure to Unix/Linux, so I guess I have at least a
little familiarity with iOS. That memory is well faded, though.


You really don't need too much experience. I use PC's for various
reasons that I will not talk about here, so no troll Appleseed will try
to tell me Apple does it better. But as I said earlier, Apple makes some
fine machines. One of my daughters, who is a creative director as a
large company a Mac in her office, and a PC when working from home. She
has no problems adjusting from one machine to another, at least on Adobe
CC, Excel and PowerPoint.



--
PeterN