Why you can never fully restore a PC
. . . despite the promises of backup software.
Backup, Backup and Backup again
Well yes, this is all very well and let’s face it, when you have hundreds of GBs of holiday snaps, music and of curse legally obtained video backups are very important because the loss of this could be more than frustrating AND these days we are generating data at such a high rate even DVDs can’t keep up.
BUT wait a minute, this is data, user data, your data the documents and multimedia files you generate as you take pictures, listen to music and write emails and so on.
What about those applications that you paid for and installed?
What about that lovely software bundle that came with your shiny new PC/Laptop/Tablet/thingy?
Restore your system
The helpful information that goes with the button on my laptop the ‘One Key Recovery’ restores you machine to its initial state. To me, that initial state is the state it was in when I bought it and at that time that state included some bundled software.
Frustrated with a slowing machine, mainly because I have installed/removed loads of different bits of software I decided to rid it of everything and start over using the ‘One Key Recovery System’ to restore said machine to its original state.
We know what’s happened!
Of course we do.
It has come back and currently going through 172 windows updates whilst the vastly outdated anti-virus stuff is trying to update itself, even so and while doing all of that its faster than it was.
BUT
What’s missing is all that lovely bundled software which was in there when I bought the machine and over the years became remarkably attached to and now is sadly missing.
I have made contact
Via email naturally, purely because I don’t want to spend ages on hold and then get asked to complete a quick survey on a scale of 1 to 10 when 1 = severely ***** off and 10 = unhappy did you find our support service helpful…. you know the kind of thing.
Lets see what happens, I’m guessing not much but my inner anarchist is thinking that the bundled software was part of the deal and the ‘One Key Recovery’ was supposed to return the machine to its previous state. . . so surely. . . you’ think?
There will be an update, don’t know when but as the saying goes. . watch this space.
P.S. 86 updtes to go. . . it will be a long night. . no I’ll just leave the thing going. . .
And so, the local support desk working out of Mumbai took me thrugh some standard questions, a couple of times as the accent was so strong, and low and behold, because the software I coulldnt restore was part of a ‘bundle’ Microsoft can’t help and have to go back to the “boint if burchase”.
I did a quick google for the missing software and found it was free which was disappointing in a way, it seems that the bundle that came with this machine was designed to make you think you got a good deal but since the software was free. . . hmmm!
Now then, It appears that the operating system has been restored to ‘its original state’ as expected and of course as expected 172 updates were needed and several restarts.
The bundled software wasn’t of course restored but interestingly, that software is free (as above) to download from places like Microsoft. . yes I know you wouldn’t put Microsoft and free together but checkout Office 2010 Starter and others.
A full day of updates and my machine is now clean and fast again. . for a while…