We had a customer passed our way this month who almost fell victim to “legacy.”
LEGACY is a term manufacturers and developers use to describe their older products which are no longer cost effective to support fully.
We are talking about things like Adobe Creative Suite 5, Microsoft Office 2013, first generation i7, even hybrid storage disks, all in one.
It wouldn’t take a colleague of mine three guesses to work out what caused the poor guy to have a problem. Especially when I detail the symptoms:
- painfully slow boot time
- start button does nothing and when you reboot normally you get the black screen with the prompt “Windows is configuring updates.”
For those not in the know: a recent update was trying to install but had failed. This wasn’t too difficult to resolve in the end as Microsoft have a downloadable update assistant which seems to fix this problem when the built-in updater fails.
The gentleman was quite techy for 77 years young, but his backup method was outdated as I showed him.
Even though he had two separate hard drives to which he copies his entire C: drive each month, alternating between the two; he only has two months of backup, and if something gets corrupted without him knowing, he is just going to backup that corrupted file each time, the original gone forever if he does not discover it himself within those two months.
I also talked to him about his lack of a password manager, or a different secure system in the cloud to store his account information, even the license keys for the old software he wants to keep.
He told me that he had got too old to justify buying new things now and that he is happy with the versions of software and hardware that he has. And why shouldn’t he be? They serve him well and he doesn’t need them for professional use, having retired over ten years ago.
But if his hard drive were to fail, I told him that only the files would be recoverable easily, because he wasn’t taking a system image, just drag-and-dropping his C: drive contents. The software would be lost without the license information he had misplaced.
I instructed him on how to take a more robust backup but that file corruption could still possibly cause minor data loss even with a system image. I told him the method he was using before was not the way to achieve what he was hoping to, not simply anyway.
Problem fixed + value added = happy customer.
Talk to me if you have any questions.
Michael
