This is a posting not about failure, but about the importance of excellent customer service. 

Last week one of my clients had several Lenovo laptops fail (BSOD) due to a bad anti-virus definition file in Vipre Antivirus.  The definition file considered the drivers for the hard drive to be rogue security software and quarantined them, causing the boot drive to be unreadable by Windows.  There’s a full write-up about the problem here and a solution thread here.

For us, the problem wasn’t wide-spread – it only affected a handful laptops (other users clearly don’t reboot that often!).  Of course, this happened at the worst possible time for the client – during a due diligence meeting.  At least two of the laptops involved belonged to people who were in those meetings.  Unfortunately some of the other laptops were in other remote locations and had to be shipped back to Vancouver, but that’s another story. (more…)