I Couldn't Have Fixed My PC Without My Mac

[Greg Mein]

I touched on the topic of my PC crashing in the AKAI EWI thread. I desperately tried to resuscitate but it was a catastrophic failure of the hard drive and there was no patching or repairing, it was toast. This is a 12 year old Dell XPS 8500, a little long in the tooth but it's only used for what I'll call administrative tasks; Excel spreadsheets, PDF manuals, playing DVD's, hosting a couple backup drives and other rather mundane things. I mostly use my Macs and I could get by without it but it's nice to have around.

 

I couldn't justify the price of a new PC and didn't want to spend a lot of money fixing this one. I had a couple of older HDs around so I grabbed the larger one and managed to bring the PC back to life using a USB optical drive (the one in the PC hadn't been working right for a while) and the Win 7 disk that came with the computer new. That was great and I don't mind Win 7 but it's a dated OS now and won't run some of the modern versions of programs I use. I'd upgraded to Win 10 quite some time ago when that option was offered for free. I wanted Win 10 back on this machine and also decided it should have a new SSD and optical drive before I button the thing back up.

 

I found a 1G SSD for $35 and an optical drive for $25 so the upgrade/repair investment was minimal. Where I ran into a problem was trying to get Win 10 installed. There must be 1000 Microsoft webpages but there is one where I should have been able to get Win 10 reloaded. I had the account, was authorized for it, got the downloads but the two seemingly relevant programs just wouldn't install, they kept throwing errors. I went around in circles for a while trying to figure it out but you know how frustrating that can be.

 

Later, for no particular reason, I went to that Win 10 webpage while sitting at my Mac and wow, it recognized that I wouldn't be able to install Win 10 and so offered me the ISO image file, yes please and thank you 😀. Things went real smooth after that; I burned the ISO to a disk and installed from that, easy peasy.

 

That computer is running like new now, perhaps better with that SSD. I've got programs reloaded and am mostly back to where I wanted to be. Could I have fixed it without the ISO image file? Perhaps but it sure was going to be a hassle trying to get support and figure out what the problem was.

 

No real point to the story except for the irony of using my Mac to fix my PC and I'm hoping to get several more years of use out of that computer.