Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler OT- Computer insurance!

Here is one that I NEVER thought of!
My sister's computer recently contracted a virus/Spyware issue that killed it dead.
She remembered this morning that she had added "Computer Protection" to her homeowner's insurance policy, mostly to cover the pounding that her kids might subject it to, for pennies.
She called them and they are indeed going to cover her (not yet known if they are going to pay replacement cost or a depreciated amount on what her machine is now worth- I'm guessing the later) on the computer.
I was astonished!
I had never thought of doing this, and it makes tremendous sense.
Anyone else out there ever think of doing this, or trying to collect on a machine that was lost due to infection?

I did the SP2 thingy update about 5 days ago, set up my computer for automatic updates and bam, my computer went nutzo. The screen went blank and there was a siren sound coming from that complex box. My comp tech son came over, shook his head and said he thought the power source fried. He found that it also had a virus. I think the virus was the SP2. He reformatted my hard drive. But, the graphic card seems to be acting up. I'm just guessing, but SP2 is probably satanic.

That's crazy!

All of our computers, HT, and CD/DVD in the house are insured for replacement costs, not a depriciated value of the original cost. And yes, it is not cost prohibitve at all, just need to be able to document the origianl costs, and also making a inventory video is a good idea. All are covered for any sort of damage, even a dummy spilling coffee. Lot less stress about having good surge protection and so on.

I am reminded of an ole' IT saying -

"Bugs enter through open Windows"

To get off on a little rant here...

As a worker in the industry, I've really started to get the feeling that computers are just too damn difficult for the lay person who does not want to invest all of their time in reading about them and tinkering. Even those of us in IT get our heads spun around every couple of weeks by some new security thing or repair process we should be using. What the hell is going on? Why do people keep buying these things and putting up with this crap? To pull out the old (inaccurate) car analogy, would you put up with a car that needed its oil changed every week?

Would you buy a piece of audio equipment with known flaws that the manufacturer says will get fixed with the next upgrade or model? That's what people do with software, every day.

What gives?

...end rant.

I'm sure there's a Mac pitch in there somewhere....

we the public are beta testers. but in defense of ms and software companys there is no standard for hardware or other software for the company's to conform to so they have to do the best they can and fix errors on the fly.

I was trying really really hard not to do the Mac pitch... because the Mac has its own problems, although they tend to be less catastrophic than Windows.

Plus it really pisses people off.

In reply to:

---

Plus it really pisses people off

---

naw, not really.. i have been tuning you out for months!!



bigjohn