Who is this page for?

1. Those who have been told they need to format their hard drive and reinstal windows, losing all their information (downloads, documents you have typed etc etc) and there's a good chance you have thousands of documents if you are still using Windows 98

2. You ony have a "recovery cd" or a "master" cd which will wipe your drive clean and put everything back like it was when it left the factory. For those people you will almost certainly find the Windows installation files in a a folder in your Windows directory, usually called Options e.g c:\windows\options\cabs these are your windows setup files.

3. Those "techies" who told the above to format their drive and reinstall windows because a) they don't know any better or b) they thought they were helping the above by saying that or c) they just couldnt be bothered thinking about another way.

4. Those "techies" with all the certs and exams after their names who have never done Tech Sup except when they were sleeping and dreaming up the next load of bull to give people or who have read a few books and think thats all there is to it or who have have no real practical experience of Tech Sup in a corporate environment..

5. The "techie" who is interested in finding solutions to problems.

6. All of the above

Tech Sup in a corporate environment is NOT about telling the user to format and reinstall windows. It is about giving a solution to the user. Imagine the scenario:  you work in Tech Sup for a large corporate organisation, a user calls you and has a problem with their system. Do you a) tell this user who looks after corporate accounts making thousands for the company to format and lose all the customers data. b) offer them a solution so they can save the info before fixing the problem. or c) resign now because you told them to do a) and you know damn well you will be out of a job by the days end. Of course the answer is b) and that is what Tech Sup is. Offering the customer a solution to their problem that is satisfactory to them and to you, keeps you in a job and as a by-product makes your job as Tech Sup invaluable to those users as they now think the sun shines out of places it doesnt naturally reach concerning you. You have just saved your company thousands of man hours, thousands of pounds, and the user now knows what real Tech Sup is. Any fool can tell them to format and reinstal but that fool shouldnt be you if you want to keep your job for much longer and if you are really interested in Tech Sup as a career.

Firstly, unless there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with the hard drive there is NO need to format it at all. You can run scandisk/chkdsk (depending on your version of windows) to mark the sectors on the drive that you think maybe causing you a problem and attempt to recover any files in those sectors. So forget the excuses of the so-called techies.

Lastly, I half expect someone to go through these pages and prove me wrong, EVENTUALLY. But as long as they learn whilst proving me wrong than all is good. At least these pages will have made a techie think before telling someone to format.

All these pages are available as a plain text file for those needing it.