Digital River – A tale of woe, poor customer service and the whole Windows 7 debacle….

Unless you’re either dead or you happen to be completely computer illiterate, which doesn’t quite explain why you’re reading this blog, then you may have heard about Steve and Bill from Microsoft’s latest pet project: Windows 7. ‘Ahh’ you say, flashy new gizmos, built in touch-screen ability, redesigned and improved applications, a new OS for a new era, built bigger, better – stronger! Well yes, you could quite possibly be right, if you can get the f*cking thing to work that is….

Mine, like many others, is a tale of woe, reformatting, downloading, installation and ultimately stressful despair with a dark and violent undertone of seething anger – I am Bill’s raging bile duct. Having recently purchased a new computer, I decided to give my old one to my sister, who subsequently in a matter of weeks managed to bodge it good and proper. ‘Never mind’ I told her, ‘bring it back over and I’ll fix it. While I’m doing that I might as well stick Windows 7 on it seeing as you’re a student and you can get it cheap’. Oh the arrogance! There’s an ancient Chinese proverb that says ‘cheap things are not good, good things are not cheap’. How right they are.

Having got the computer back, and after getting a new TB hard drive delivered, I was ready to begin phase 1. Having experienced the joys of a Microsoft installation on many occasions, I was well prepared for a long and arduous struggle: I was not disappointed. Step 1 began with a bit of a case clean up and the installation of the new TB hard drive; so far so good. Step 2 was to whack on XP, as the Windows 7 student offer is an upgrade that requires you to download a pack, rather than an ISO. Of course the process also needs a legal version of a previous Microsoft OS to begin the upgrade. The tale of woe begins with the XP installation. After inserting the disk and watching the beautiful blue screen for a few minutes my zealous over-clicking and immediate nature took control and I accidentally formatted the whole TB, instead of performing a much quicker custom format. Doh!

2 hours and a few games of Fifa 10 later, the drive was well and truly formatted. The installation process was fairly quick and I was soon ready to begin the next phase. The next step was to install a few MOBO drivers and a network adapter so I could get on to great world wide interweb. A few more restarts later and it was off to the home of blue-screen tech to get SP2 and whatever else I needed to begin the upgrade process. With XP fully locked and loaded it was time to rock Digital River’s website and download the Windows 7 package. This is where it starts to go very, very wrong.

The computer itself is not that old, its’ got dual-core and 4gig of memory; as technology is moving on pretty rapidly nowadays I thought that it was probably time to move across to 64bit architecture, rather than the normal 32bit. With the student offer you get the option to choose either Home or Pro, and 32bit or 64bit. Unfortunately, the Pro option is down in the corner of the screen and as I hadn’t installed my graphics drivers I could quite reach the accept button. So it was off to Nvidia to grab the drivers, another restart followed before I could head back to the Digital River website to complete the download.

So far the whole process had taken roughly 4 hours and I was looking forward to a rather simple download, unpack and upgrade process, but it was not to be, Microsoft doesn’t roll that way. Bored and slightly square-eyed I left the download running and headed off to catch last orders before the local closed. An hour later and the last phase was ready for implementation. I opened the download folder, hit the executable file and waaa waaaa waaaaah waaaaaaaah. Cue disappointment and the family fortune ‘X – that’s the wrong answer’ sound effect. ‘I can’t let you do that Dave’ chuckled Bill and Steve as they waltzed to the bank arm in arm. For f*ck’s sake….

The real error message was more like this “We are unable to create or save new files in the folder in which this application was downloaded. Please check the folder properties to make sure that you have security permission on the folder to write files and that the folder is not read-only”. Turns out that Microsoft and Digital River completely failed to anticipate the mass migration from 32 to 64bit systems, and instead of providing an ISO option on their website they used a 32bit application, which of course will not run a 64bit programme. Having trawled through the net in the last few days it turns out that I’m not the only one experiencing this problem, in-fact hundreds of people attempted to migrate and were caught by this issue. Forums and help sites are understandably full of very angry Microsoft customers unable to complete their installations.

I think what makes the process worse is the complete lack of communication from Digital River’s customer service department. I’ve sent numerous emails now and haven’t received a single response, not even an automated ‘yes we know about this problem and are currently working on a solution’ email. My second grip is how difficult would it really be to whack up a second server with an ISO 64bit download for all those with similar problems. It can’t really be that difficult to arrange, surely? There is currently a work around being touted on the Windows 7 forum which looks promising, but again that’s beside the point, Microsoft and their distribution partner should have seen this coming, they should have been better prepared, and above all, they should send out replies to anxious students and academics across the globe who can no longer use their PC’s due to a flawed installation process.

Nice one Microsoft FTL……

FTL....