"Upgrades" Suck

I just thought I'd mention that.

Three weeks after the hard drive crash, which apparently coincided with the death of the DVD head in our CD-DVD drive, we're finally almost at full functionality. Did you know that external DVD drives are "in" and internal ones "out?" But Damon says we don't have any more room for peripherals on our desk, so we mail-ordered. Which means I'm still several days away from completely reinstalling my Sims2 game; but fortunately everything else we need was either on a CD or downloadable in an .exe file.

However, ever since we restored the data from backup, we can't send e-mail. We can receive it, in one of the three different e-mail folders Outlook 2010 constructed for us even though we didn't ask it to, but no matter where or how we try to compose outgoing messages, it insists on putting them into the outbox subfolder of a different one and then tells us it can't send any of them because it can't read the data file. Which data file, it won't say. I'd think it was the restored one, given the timing, but we can read all of that stuff, and in any case outgoing e-mail shouldn't have anything to do with our archive.

Microsoft can send an automated test message using our account, so it has to be possible, but as for letting us know how it works so we can figure out where the problem is - pfft, we're just the user.

And I can't penetrate the layers of security protecting Microsoft's "customer service" personnel from contact with a customer. The websites of course only cover the most basic problems encountered by the computer illiterate, I can't e-mail them, and following the links that promise me a phone number just leads me around in a circle to someplace where I've been unsuccessful before, without a glimmer of actual contact information.

Anybody got an idea?

Or a recommendation for non-Microsoft e-mail browsers? Because I'm really disinclined to deal with them at any level. We only have the latest version of Office installed because some publishers (being hopelessly whipped into submission by our corporate masters) will only accept files in that format. Which is no picnic to translate from our perfectly-functioning WordPerfect8 program, let me tell you; but I'd rather deal with that occasionally than use Word, aka THE WORST WORD PROCESSING PROGRAM EVER MADE. But that's another rant.

I'm going to go weed now. Weeds never upgrade.