At last!

Pardon my absence. I’ve been busy and our internet provider has had prolonged outages this week.

You may recall that the 1TB hard drive in Maria’s laptop computer crashed recently – irretrievably, it turns out.

So I got a newer version of the drive and installed it, but we seem to have mislaid the backup software to restore the operating system.

After two nights and days of fruitless searching, I bit the bullet yesterday and bought a copy of Windows 10 from Best Buy.

But when I got it home, I found the software was on a USB drive and not a CD/DVD as in the past. I plugged in the USB drive, fired up the computer and hit F12 for Boot Options. That’s where my day went to hell.

The Dell did not offer a USB port as a boot option.

I called my unofficial IT guy, Tim Balough, in the highest incorporated town in the United States and he suggested trying to copy the contents of the USB drive to a DVD. I did and it failed.

I woke up this morning ready to throw in the towel, sell the Win10 software at a loss on Ebay and buy a copy of Windows 7 on DVD.

Then Maria suggested checking with the Best Buy Geek Squad. So when my internet service was finally restored about 10 a.m., I went online to the geeksquad.com and had an on-screen chat with Agent Samantha.

No worries, she said. Just take it to your local Best Buy and they will install Win10 for you.

Really?

Down at Best Buy, the Geek Squad guy plugged the USB drive into a different USB port and, wonder of wonders, it showed up in the boot options.

No charge.

Back at home I plugged the USB drive into the port the Geek Squad guy had used, but it didn’t appear in my boot option choices. I repeated the exercise about six time until the USB port finally appeared.

Now we have a new hard drive running a new operating system that is nothing like what we’re used to.

Happily, the Amazon Vine program picked today to offer me an introduction to Windows 10 book with instructional CD.

We’re gonna need it.