Gnomie James Dwight from San Antonio, Texas writes:

Dear Chris,

Last year I wrote about a problem with XP and my sister-in-law’s PC. Her motherboard (and I think the power supply) fried because of a power surge.

Anyway, what I did was buy a better motherboard and a 400W power supply (replacing the smaller one that was always getting hot).

The hard drive was OK and had all her nursing home files on it.

When XP came up, the first thing it said was that we would have to reactivate it by entering the key. Fine, I did and it said it was invalid. No way, because XP came with the PC and it was legal.

Also, just how could I get online to activate it? Well, I called the Windows help line and did everything the people there said and nothing worked. As a final resort they said I would have to buy a new copy of Windows XP and install it. Sorry to say that calls for reformatting and losing everything. Luckily, my sister-in-law did have hard copies. But the point is: three days of Microsoft giving me instructions on how to fix the problem and then telling me that I would have to buy a new copy was too much.

Now my wife has bought me a new PC. However, I am not as coolheaded as my sister-in-law, and if I ever have this problem with XP and ask customer service reps at Microsoft for help and they give me the runaround like that, well, they will get an earful - Texas style.

I have used ME since it came out and have never had problems with it - I was even thinking of installing it on this new PC to avoid such a situation.

Anyway, I hope you address this caution to your other readers: There is a pitfall to buying these new PCs with XP already installed. Don’t rely on that system install disk that comes with a new PC!

[tags]customer service nightmare,system install,xp install,os install,power surge,new pc[/tags]