Despite my nickname as “Bootleg Jane“, when I find a company that earns my trust, I stick by them i.e. I buy products from there. A case (or two) in point: Amazon and the IDM company that makes UltraEdit. About 2 days ago, I had to reformat my laptop due to a botched driver installation of my new HP Officejet J6480 which is a story for another day, (perhaps today?). Sadly, my last ‘file’ backup was over a month ago while my last computer backup was much more recently. However, for some reason, Microsoft made it so that you could NOT recover individual files from a Windows Image backup file. Really odd. Anyway, my biggest hurt was the thought that I would love about $80 worth of new music files I’d downloaded via Amazon MP3. Their policy is to not offer re-downloads of MP3 albums or songs so I was essentially screwed. Nevertheless, I decided to pay Amazon a call and I spoke with a customer service representative named Deepak. Initially, he gave me the standard company line about being unable to help me because of their policy. I tried begging, but he didn’t budge so I requested to speak to someone else. After being on hold for a couple of minutes, Deepak came back on the line and told me that he’d spoken with a supervisor who agreed to release some of the music files to me as a show of good faith (my words). I was over the moon with joy. 🙂 I was prepared with the list of 3 albums that I absolutely didn’t want to lose and sure enough, the mp3 files were available for download in my Amazon digital library after I got off the phone! In a weird twist, it turns out that I didn’t exactly lose my music files because I had transferred some files to my Palm Treo 750 which I can use as a media player and I pretty much had all my music files! I feel bad for not even checking my computer thoroughly, but it’s really nice to know that Amazon will come through for me especially in a genuine case as mine.
In the case of UltraEdit, my case was rather unorthodox. My license for Ultraedit ran out earlier in the year (around May) and I held off on upgrading. However, I ran Secunia PSI and read about a security advisory concerning UltraEdit. All I saw was the word “malicious attack” and I panicked. So, yesterday, I sent a nice email to UltraEdit asking for a patch to “plug” this “security hole” or whatever-it-was. This morning, I received a reply from UltraEdit’s customer service allaying my fears about the severity of the vulnerability. However, they went a step further by giving me a complimentary upgrade to UltraEdit 14.20!! That was so unexpected and I feel fortunate to have made my bets on such good companies. I forked over ~ $45 for a copy of UltraEdit over a year ago and I would do it again because their product (which I use as a Notepad replacement) is solid and can handle whatever I throw at it. So, without further ado, please visit UltraEdit for the solution that’s right for your situation. It’s worth the price tag, but if you are short on cash, check out Notepad ++ which is the next best thing.