I've been warning my vet that her laptop is walking wounded for literally, years. So, it up and dies last month. They come to me in a panic. Nope. Nothing can be done. Unit isn't even powering on. Battery's good, power supply good. Buy a new laptop. I send them a recommendation.

And nothing happens for 3 weeks.

Then it comes in last Friday and it's assholes and elbows to get it ready for this Friday. Okay not a big deal. Install office, install AV, install AM. Except that her equally ancient portable printer doesn't want to operate on USB 2 or 3. And despite being advertised as Bluetooth, doesn't have the validation code on it anywhere.

Le sigh.

Digging around in HP's moldy basement I find a version of the installer that is marked "For IT use only". Well, I always was one that couldn't resist pushing the big red button labelled "Do not push".

After a couple of passes the IT use only installer finally installs a critical, missing SYS file and the printer groans to life. Huzzah!

So it's on to other problems. Notably that I use robocopy to create a running incremental backup of the practice management software's data that her veterinary business requires to an installed SD card. Ah, now it's Microsoft's turn to mess with things. It seems they've been busy monkeywrenching the schedule tasks interface. But really, it was just a matter of making sure the scheduled task runs at the highest level of authority. Nota bene, all is well.

But this time I installed remote access software so I can take a peek at problems from the comfort of my own home, the NEXT time it breaks.