No More Windows Support

There was a time, I was the man. I worked in Windows every single day, knew it inside and out, from 3.1 to XP. When friends needed advice, I was the guy they’d call. When they screwed something up and needed to be bailed out, my phone would ring.

So, even though I’ve been a Mac user for two years, it was me that got the call when my friend Lauren’s Sony VAIO started acting up. She’d told me that she thought it was acting up because it was full. It was, at least one partition, so I started going through apps to dump to free up some space.

We got to Hotbar. Now, I really detest Hotbar. It insinuates itself into every little thing you do, from Explorer to Outlook, really ugly. So I ask her — do you use it? No? Mind if I delete it? No? Great!

“The file MSVCRT.DLL is a shared file. If you delete it, other programs may be affected. Do you want to delete the file MSVCRT.DLL?”

We were talking and catching up and I was sort of haphazardly clicking and said “Yes.” Everything continued to work.

A few hours later, I was sitting at my office and my phone rang. It was Lauren. “Do you know why my computer won’t boot up?” Damn. I buzzed back by her place at 4:30 in the afternoon and rebooted myself. This is the error, I swear to God:

“Explorer cannot find the file MSVCRT.DLL. You must reinstall Windows. OK.”

So, this is it. As of this moment, I’m no longer qualified to do Windows tech support for friends. That’s it, there it is. I knew the day would come, and today is it.