old PC…

This is just a rehash of my latest side-job. I thought it was interesting, but I’m sure the following story won’t have much entertainment value to many others.

There’s a person I’ve met through work that needed some work done on her computer.  We were having a really hard time trying to find a good time for me to come over & work on her computer. We started trying to set a time back in September… She’d cancel a few times, then I’d have a conflict pop up… Her house caught fire & she got burnt pretty badly & wasn’t too worried about it for a while. (Crazy stuff, I’m telling you!)

Anyhow, she’s feeling better & bought a computer from me to replace the old one because it was just causing her so much trouble. She sent her niece to come & pick up the computer from me & told me she’d need some help transferring data from her old PC to the new one.

She said she thinks it’s Windows 95 or 98, but really isn’t sure. I pack my briefcase with the usual assortment of IDE-USB adapter, USB hard drive, multi-tool, etc… I walk out thinking I’ll just pull the files off on the the USB drive & put them into the other PC, no problem.

The only worries I had were that she said she’s using Quicken to manage multiple accounts and she’s trying to bring that data into the newest version. I’m not an accountant & I have learned to hate accounting concepts (from working with implementing Epicor’s ERP software @ work), but I can figure most things out when it comes to software & computers. I was just hoping Quicken could easily import data from it’s older versions.

Anyhow, I get there & see the computer case is OLD… By old, I mean it didn’t originally come with a CD-ROM drive… It still had a 5-1/4″ Floppy drive in it! When she turned it on it booted up to a C:> prompt (DOS). I thought… OK… I’m good with the DOS Prompt… I told her to drive & show me what she knew & needed & I’d take it from there. (She is the type that wants to know everything about what’s going on, so I figured I’d make sure to let her show me around so she didn’t feel like I was the rude IT guy telling her to get out of the way).

Anyhow, she types “win” and up pops the Windows 3.1 logo… Woh! I laughed out loud & told her this definitely predates Windows 95 & that this was before I even started messing with Windows PCs. She got a kick out of that too.

It looked like the memory was starting to fail because it was complaining that there wasn’t enough memory to open Quicken and there was nothing else open at the time. Instead of struggling with the old machine, I went ahead & took her 2GB drive from the old PC & copied all 95MB of it’s contents into a folder on her new computer…  Wow… 95MB… A complete install of Windows, Quicken, and her Quicken data dating 1994 to 2008.

Well, I set everything up, imported her old Quicken Data into her new setup and she had a ton of basic computing questions (which is always fun because it makes me look like a genius! hehe… No ego boost there). She told me her work computer is just as old if not older than the one here at her house and she’ll need me to work my magic there too.

If only I could find a steady stream of people who need this kind of help, I could start working for myself!

Got any ideas?