Today, I was asked to help organise a printer for someone. We headed out to get a cheap, basic laser printer for home use. Sure, no problem. We checked PCworld’s website and spotted a simple Samsung 1640. On visiting the local shop we found “they don’t stock it.” Ok, We’ll look at another, “How about the little Canon there?…” Erm, no, “We’ve only got display stock. Maybe try Comet.” I have to say that the shop looked pretty badly stocked in every department. I overheard a couple of staff chatting to potential customers, and they were general very negative about stock levels. So, Comet. We arrive and find only one brand of laser printer. It’s priced cheap but comes with a very low yeild toner cartridge. “How much is a replacement toner?” I ask, “£55 for a 1500 page cartridge.” WHAT? No bloody way.
What a disappointing day. Stock, just wasn’t and customer service, just didn’t.
After doing the usual shop crawl. I suggested, “Let’s just try Big W” (The Woolworths store) Nothing. Not a PC or anything in sight, except for a Wii. Lot’s of those. One thing that did catch my eye was the barricade over half of the shop and the place looking like a car boot sale.
“How about Asda?” Well, No laser printers and plenty of over-priced Inkjets.
While in Asda, I actually spotted a nice little laptop they’re selling for £249. Windows Vista laptop too. The problem? (there has to be one!) It comes with 512MB of RAM. Excuse me? Does Vista even boot with 512MB of RAM? Ok, I know it does, but seriously, do they expect this machine to be more than a paper-weight with 512MB of RAM? I didn’t really spend time looking over the specifications on the machine after seeing that. The machine looked fine, but Asda, please get some common sense. All you will do, by selling this machine, is piss off your customers who will immediately need to upgrade the RAM. RAM can be bought fairly cheaply, if you know where you are looking, but how many people will know where to look. Maybe PCWorld? Hell no, have you seen their prices and stock levels?
I revisited the previous data backup and recovery job today. The data was recovered by PC world and copied to an external USB drive before I got there. PC World appears to have missed a few important folders and data spaces, but since we had the original drive (and there was nothing wrong with it) I set it up inside my USB/CAT5 caddy. Finding the data on the drive was no problem, allowing me to complete the transfer.
iTunes is annoying. Very annoying. iTunes simply would not recognise the library data even though everything was copied over correctly. I ended up creating a fake library location on the new machine to correspond with the location used by the old PC. I then managed to get iTunes to detect and import this data (after authorising everything!) At this point iTunes was happy, but I wasn’t. The data was in the wrong place. Moving the data folder in iTunes and Consolidating the data moved the files where I wanted them. Now to clean up all of the crap required to keep iTunes happy. Why do they make this so difficult? There is no need to do all of this work. Just create a folder structure and work within it please, don’t route all the XML data with hard paths, that’s just annoying.
Anyway, with iTunes kicked and accepting its fate, on to completing the data backup systems. Shared folders were built, allowing the machines to sync to each other. The client is happy using Microsoft Backup so we run this and set it off. Everything was working nicely on both machines.
Nice, except for the iTunes crap.
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