A client approached me with two desktop PCs and a laptop. Both desktops were Windows XP and the laptop was running Windows Vista. Upon investigation I discovered that the power supply unit had failed on the newer of the two desktops, and that the fault with the laptop was on the motherboard not in the power adaptor.

Through the purchase of additional memory, and an IDE and SATA PCI expansion card, I was able to consolidate the desktops and the laptop's SATA hard-drive into a single system. I used the recovery partition to reinstall windows on the newer desktop, then upgraded it from XP Home SP1 to SP3.

The graphics card began reporting a 'out of resources' error immediately after the recovery process, and would not start the driver. This eventually turned out to be due to the dial-up modem card. As the client was using a LAN cable to her router, I removed the old modem expansion card from the machine, which freed up the resources and fixed the graphics.

I ensured all drivers and windows were fully upgraded, and installed a few freeware packages that I thought the customer would find useful - primarily LibreOffice, PDF Creator and Irfanview.

I delivered the PC to the clients home and set it up and configured it, ensuring they were happy with the situation before I left.

So I had a chance to use a friend's Windows 8 mobile phone today. Not particularly impressed. Lots of menu options that aren't what you are looking for, or direct you to sites where you have to pay money. The tiles really cut down the number of options you can see on the screen at any one time, which leads to pages and pages of tiles. All I wanted to do was put some mp3 files on it. Not hard? No, not hard, but very aggravating.

An Android phone for example, I would plug in. Then copy the files to the hard-drive that appears in Windows Explorer.

This phone? Window's update didn't recognise it. So then I needed to search for drivers. Turns out you need this discontinued piece of software from Microsoft called Zune. You install it, and it spends ages trawling through your Win7 Library directories building a database of music files. Then the phone needs updating, which is a very slow progress that repeats over and over. I can see their point, they are assuming (wrongly) that people will only connect their phone to their own PC. But still, installing all this on my PC just to move a few files to the phone. :-(

So yeah, a two minute or less task just became an hour or more. [sarcasm]Thank you Microsoft[/sarcasm]