Gone past punch drunk, try numb

I have had two weeks of utter shite.

Things have gone wrong on a large scale.  I already told you about the laptop going pear shaped and all the grief I had having to get a new hard drive on my very limited funds.

The laptop I bought with the money I raised from selling all my DVDs on E Bay has proved to be nothing but a pain and no improvement on what I already had, in fact with a new HD and op system, the Gateway which Anita now has, was running fantastically.

Someone gave me a hard drive to go in the caddy I bought to try access data on the fried one (which failed), that too refuses to play ball despite the guy giving me a routine to carry out I didn't even knew existed in Windows.

Everyone's been excited about the new Android Ice Cream Sandwich op system that has been rolled out across all brands of smartphone and via various carriers.

Vodafone were due to do this last week and postponed.  It was released yesterday and a push message came through to say you could get an over the air update using wi fi.

I moved it closer to the router so it had a strong signal and pressed the go ahead button.  It semed to be going well and I went off to make some toast.  Came back and saw a message that the connection had failed.

Tried to re establish only to find it saying no updates are available.  There's a lot of chatter about this on the Vodafone tech forum and some are saying the servers were probably busy.  I don't buy this, because I know of someone who updated no problems after me.

I followed advice and re installed Samsungs unpopular Kies software on the big PC.  When I plugged the phone in via cable, it actually recognised it and a message came up that there was an upgrade available.

It crashed saying there was insufficient disk space.  It didn't actually inform me where it was trying to load to and a check revealed that there was 10 Gig in the phone, 3.6 on the SD card and loads on the PC, so it was an inaccurate message.

Back to the forum, I followed tips such as reboot, go back to factory settings, strip naked and face due north, but none of these worked,

All this took place over about four hours, so imagine my mood by bed time.

Charlie Chalk made a comment about removing the SD card altogether just for the hell of it, which I did this morning.  I was amazed the Kies installation went way past what it had done yeaterday, but my delight was short lived. Installation crashed and I got a nice friendly "do you want to conduct an emergency recovery".  Yes I did, and this failed twice, the last one prompting yet another friendly message which contradicted the friendly message on the screen of the now useless phone.

I phoned Samsung, who I will say, were excellent.  To the point, none of this bluster you get from call centres and statements of the bleedin obvious or, stupid unrelated bit of advice read from a manual of pointless soultions.

Unfortunately the phone has to go back to Samsung for repair which will take up to 10 days.

Speaking as someone who worked in a large consumer electronics organisation (Tandy) and has a lot of experience from manufacture to sale.  One of the watchwords of anything to do with electronice for the public, is to keep things as simple and as prat proof as possible.

Just reading the problems being experience with both the update and Kies online, it is clear Samsung have got this wrong, or in the case of the update which contains "bloatware" from the carriers like Vodafone, is it their adulterations that are causing all the problems ?

Unfortunately, all I could see on the Vodafone forum were loads of threads being created with a variety of messes caused by this update and the only comfort available was we're all in the same boat.  No one on the tech side seemed to have any advice of a specific nature, just "have you tried this" options.

As an op system, I hear good reports.  Charlie Chalk had the upgrade go pretty smoothly on his HTC recently and he loved the new O/S.

As you might imagine, I am not in the best of moods right now.  We all have stuff go wrong in our lives and we deal with it, but sometimes things pile up and when you've no reseources to deal with them, small problems can become big ones.

I've a list of them at the moment which need working through.  So tiresome.

Told OBC I was tempted to jump off the balcony.  He felt this was a bit extreme for someone with a bost phone !  I suppose he's right.

 

Comments

[Peter McGregor]

Never mind you still have your computer. OBC is right it would be extreme to jump off the balcony, who would they deliver the fixed phone to if you did that? ;-)