Literally. Like I had a 4-5 hour power outage earlier this evening. I did get a chance to use my Gooloo power bank described in an earlier post. I was initially confused when it didn't seem to charge my cellphone, but it had to do with a certain unwritten fact of life with my cellphone: if the phone is running too hot, it won't charge. When I run into a hot phone/charging issue, I'll power off the cellphone; if and when the phone sufficiently cools, it'll start charging.
It's amazing how the little details slip by until you're facing a problem. I had never put my electric utility's outage number in my contacts, and I couldn't get Internet services on my cellphone during the outage. (Obviously my cable Internet wasn't working.) I could find my utility's invoices in my email, but the invoices didn't include contact numbers.
But over the past day or so, I had been hit by a cluster of technical issues. One of them involved Google Voice which for some reason didn't seem to work: I was connecting to the call, but neither party could hear the other. I did a lot of checks on audio and tweaking of call properties, but for whatever reason, the problem wen away with a reboot.
I also ran into into a series of issues with my security software, including the same PC holding multiple licenses and certain functionality not working. Long story short, these problems reflected some trace files not purged by a simple deinstall. Now the vendor has a removal tool often referenced by security customer support agents in past chat sessions, but the Indian agents repeatedly ignored my complaints they were giving me invalid URL's. I eventually stumbled across a correct download link in some other user's post. These agents simply want to take over your PC and can't deal with deviations from their scripts.
In another case, I have licensed encryption software which works with USB sticks, like my 128GB one. The software has an option to install executables both on the PC and the stick. Somehow after an upgrade I ran into an issue trying to run the executable on the stick. Repairing, uninstalling and/or reinstalling didn't work; in fact, I would get cryptic error messages simply trying to start up the executable. Long story short, I used everything (desktop search) to look for encryption software files not purged by the uninstall. After manually deleting all remaining trace files (post-deinstall), I was able to reinstall (including an option for the USB stick).
I had contacted tech support. They really don't reference uninstalls on their webpages other than a cryptic message about contacting them over upgrades. The support staffer finally emailed me a deinstall cleanup procedure AFTER I messaged him how I had resolved the problem.
Incompletely described uninstall/reinstall procedures are simply inexcusably bad usability problems. I managed to resolve both issues DESPITE tech support vs. BECAUSE of them. I have another freeware encryption software (Safehouse Explorer). I had seen references to using SE with USB sticks but was puzzled on how to install on the stick until I saw a brief reference on copying the executable from your PC install to the stick.
