We’ll start
just after 2 a.m. on Saturday morning.
The progress bar was making incremental movements, though each movement
was miniscule and slow. I went to bed at
3 a.m. and decided to let it run. At 7
a.m., I was thrilled to discover that it had completed. I clicked the tiles, one by one. Word worked; Power Point worked; One Note
worked. Excel did not work. For the next hour and a half, I uninstalled,
deleted, and reinstalled yet another new download of Office. When the progress bar was only half through
in 3 hours, I turned it off. I would
wait for the senior technician call…the call that never came.
I practically
killed myself getting home from my Saturday errands by 6:00 p.m., the scheduled
time for a tech to call. I glued myself
to the computer and phone and waited. At
8:00 p.m. I finally gave up and called them.
Two hours with another overseas tech produced no real results. He was convinced that I had downloaded a
virus. He started a restore to the date
that the computer arrived at my house.
When the restore took longer than he expected, he gave me a
number and told me to call when it finished.
Eight minutes
later, I made that call, only to get yet another technician. At least this one was in the continental
United States. We had quite a good
discussion. After about 40 minutes of
various attempts at installing Office, he asked why I had downloaded a trial
version of Office. I told him I had not
downloaded a trial version or any version other than the one for which I had a
code key. I told him that the previous
tech had done a restore back to the day I brought the machine home. He relegated my end of the phone call to canned
music, and I watched lots of movement on the screen. All of the sudden, Office was downloading and
installing. It took all of 10
minutes. Then he came back on the line. He told me that everything should work
properly and asked me to test all four Office tiles. They worked like a charm. I asked if he had found a virus, and he
replied that there was no virus. It
seems the computer shipped with a trial version of Office that was in complete
conflict with the paid version I had downloaded. Once the trial version was removed,
everything worked great.
So I spent an
hour on Wednesday, three hours on Friday, and four and a half hours on Saturday
on the verge of heaving the new laptop out the window. Eight and half hours of my precious time,
down the drain. I spent six hours on the
phone, doing nothing but listening to someone else type. All in search of a tech savvy guy with a
15-minute fix. But it is what it is, and
the laptop is working well…just another painful tech saga with a happy ending.
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