Since I blogged about my poor experience with Netgear, today I had a much better experience with technology. Well, sort of anyway. I was finally able to locate Windows 7 drivers for a couple of arcane devices on my desktop server, so decided to upgrade from Vista to Win 7. After cloning my drive, I put in the Windows 7 installation disk and ran it. After about 30 min, it returned an obscure error about missing files. So.. I tried it a second time telling it not to go online and get the latest update. Again it failed. That was the bad news.

It took me quite a while to find the number I could call, but eventually did. With that number in hand, I called Microsoft customer service. The first person I spoke with just took my info, gave me a case number, said that I qualified for free support, and transferred me to tech support. My call immediately dropped and I had to call back. With my case number in hand, I got right through to Jeff, who spent the next hour on the phone with me to fix the problem. First, he took the error code I had received and did some research. Within a couple of minutes, he knew exactly what caused the problem – it was my optical drive which (while working for files) would occasionally fail and not find a file. He then suggested that I copy the installation files, which my drive wouldn’t do. So, he recommended going to another computer on my network, copying the disk there and then using the network to install it. That worked! And then it installed perfectly.

Through all of this, Jeff from Microsoft in the Philippines, could not have been more knowledgeable, friendly, or helpful. Not happy that the install didn’t work on the first try, but very happy to have such a good level of support.