This has happened twice now: I’ll build a new PC about the time my father will buy a tower from Dell.
Mine comes in 4 boxes from 3 vendors over the course of a few days. His arrives fully assembled with an OS installed.
I take 3 or 4 hours to put the machine together, boot into a Linux live session, let the installer run, I get up and do something else while that goes. When that’s done, I boot into the OS, run a big ol apt or dnf or whatever command to install most of the software I like, that runs for awhile, that installs my backup software. I restore a file backup from my old machine, that runs for an hour or so, gotta love spinning rust external hard drives. And then I’m moved in and up and running.
My father, meanwhile, will:
Erase the copy of Windows that Dell included on the machine and install it fresh, which might be the only way to actually remove McAfee.
Spend an entire week, full time, installing software. Downloading setup.exes from vendor websites, running install wizards, telling Windows “Yes, put these program files in the Program Files folder” several dozen times in a row, installing some stuff to include MS Office from disc, which Windows increasingly fights him about.
Somehow also taking a rather long time manually restoring file backups.
Tweaking settings for DAYS.
I’ll have an SSD fail. I’ll go to Best Buy, buy another off the shelf, pop the thing in, and either reinstall the OS and my software, which is a rather straightforward automatic process, or simply restore my most recent file backup, which is a couple clicks, depending if it’s my / or /home drive.
My father…look, some men build model train sets, some men paint, some men plant gardens, some men fish, my father backs up his computer. I have a cabinet full of HIS backup hard drives because he’s playing pretend he has “offsite backups.” When he suffers an SSD failure, he:
Comes over to my house to monologue about it for 5 to 10 minutes
Spends an afternoon on the phone with Dell. At some point he convinces them to honor the warranty he paid extra for.
1.5 weeks later the one service tech Dell has for this state arrives with an SSD and installs it.
Engage the full manual reinstall business, because 1. he’s got his whole system on one drive, and 2. for some reason he isn’t willing to actually use the full system image backups he takes.
This has happened twice now: I’ll build a new PC about the time my father will buy a tower from Dell.
Mine comes in 4 boxes from 3 vendors over the course of a few days. His arrives fully assembled with an OS installed.
I take 3 or 4 hours to put the machine together, boot into a Linux live session, let the installer run, I get up and do something else while that goes. When that’s done, I boot into the OS, run a big ol apt or dnf or whatever command to install most of the software I like, that runs for awhile, that installs my backup software. I restore a file backup from my old machine, that runs for an hour or so, gotta love spinning rust external hard drives. And then I’m moved in and up and running.
My father, meanwhile, will:
I’ll have an SSD fail. I’ll go to Best Buy, buy another off the shelf, pop the thing in, and either reinstall the OS and my software, which is a rather straightforward automatic process, or simply restore my most recent file backup, which is a couple clicks, depending if it’s my / or /home drive.
My father…look, some men build model train sets, some men paint, some men plant gardens, some men fish, my father backs up his computer. I have a cabinet full of HIS backup hard drives because he’s playing pretend he has “offsite backups.” When he suffers an SSD failure, he: