<snipped>
On a brand name computer the licence serial should be on a sticker
on the back of the case.. under the computer if it's a portable. And you
don't need a new licence for the same computer... And
about the hard drive, they don't just die suddenly, they give out
symptoms like a message at startup that says "No OS found", booting
problems, etc. and most of the time it just takes a reseting of the
jumpers on the HD and/or a little persistance, a little dusting of
the hardware & PCI slots, reinstalling or removing the Video Card,
or even a new power supply to get it booting again and long enough
to rescue valuable information and specially the licence serial
which may be a different serial from the one on the sticker... the
serial can be found with Keyfinder...
"about the hard drive, they don't just die suddenly"
<-- in reference to that - that is not necessarily true. In fact - I have
had more drives do the 'sudden death' trick in my years of servicing
computers than I have had the 'warning, about to die' trick performed for
the drives. Power surge, just a bad HDD circuit board, a jarring at the
wrong time (laptops mostly, but I have had people knock desktop computers
off desks too. hah)
Not saying your advice about trying to backup the data is not a good thing
to try - just saying that your blanket statement, "they don't just die
suddenly" *is* incorrect. Maybe putting in the word 'usually' or puttng in
the phrase 'not all the time do they' instead of 'they don't'...
Truthfully though - this is when the user needs to rethink whatever their
previous backup scheme was *if* they lost any data. If they were doing
their backups right, they probably lost nothing to almost nothing. If they
were like a lot of people and doing no backups - they should consider this a
lesson, spend $80-$200 and invest in some external hard drive so they have a
copy of their stuff in two places at once.
I've been recommending the Seagate Replica to people lately. For a while,
Seagate had their multiple computer 500GB version for $109 U.S. I think
Amazon.com bought a few up and are selling them at $119.99 (as is
TigerDirect) right now. I wouldn't even personally consider getting the
single PC version for $30-$40 less (half the space, single computer use
only.)
Well worth it - considering in this situation, the hard drive could have
been replaced and restored to the last full backup with just a boot tricks
and a few clicks.
