In the previous post I’ve wrote about hardware side of things when your hard drive fails. It’s definitely not the greatest experience in the world, as you realize you’ve lost all of your data. Fortunately, we live in the world full of clouds and the data is mostly safe. All of the photos, work documents and files for school were backed up to some kind of cloud solution. I could instantly remember couple of files I’ve lost, but not anything important.
How do you return everything back to normal? If you didn’t have some kind of hard drive clone (and I didn’t), you start by installing OS. Here Microsoft doesn’t make it easy, at least for me. In Latvia, installing Windows for most of the people is easy, you just download the copy you want with some sort of “activation” and install it, easy enough. I’ve went the legitimate rout. I’ve bought my laptop with Windows 7 and when 8 came out I’ve paid what was small amount then (about 30€) for the update. It seemed like a great deal at the time.
When you try to start from scratch, as I did, you can’t just install Windows 8 from scratch using your key, because your key is not good enough, it supports only updating from previous version of Windows. That means, I had to install Windows 7 first and then update it to Windows 8. Fortunately, I didn’t have to install all the updates for Windows 7 and could just go straight to upgrade. In addition, it’s worth mentioning, thanks to the speed of the SSD, it takes far less time than it used to, to install the OS.
Windows 8 is with us for a long time already and so it got many updates and there are some drivers updates, that means you have to download and install, in my case, 140 updates, before you can upgrade to Windows 8.1. That takes a long time. Nevertheless, tens of minutes and two or three restarts later you are ready to download Windows 8.1 upgrade. I’ve went to Windows Store app, where the big tile was waiting for me, but when I clicked “Download” it just showed an error message, which said something about not being able to download the update right now. Not very useful, considering the true reason of the message was not entering the code for the 2 factor authentication. How someone supposed to just know that is beyond my understanding. I’ve downloaded and installed Windows 8.1 and thought I could start downloading apps I use, but not too fast. There are couple more updates about 200MB in size. Why can’t they include all of the updates in to Windows 8.1 upgrade?
After you have your OS running, everything else is easy enough. Kudos to Microsoft for the new Office, all I had to do is go to the website and click Download button and in about 10-20 minutes I’ve had full Office suit running on my laptop, ready for typing this complaint. Clicking the second button, I’ve deauthorized previous install. Office 2013 is truly an outstanding product.