Funny you should ask that!!! Although, it's clear, that my account here says "Newbie"... That's just precious, don't let it fool you, I've been a thorn in the side of Microsoft since 1985 when my boss dumped a desktop calculator/paperweight/doorstop on my desk. (Model 5150B) Anyone that vintage?
Yeah it had 2, full size, 5.25 360k floppies. This is when the IBM PC had all the necessary peripherals to use the thing listed as options.... (Kinda like having to buy the steering wheel and transmission for your new car) You had to buy a keyboard which, when used, sounded like teeth chattering in sub-zero weather and the monitor was a monochrome white/amber or green on black screen which emitted a glow that could heat your lunch and give you a tan at the same time. And it was my job to put a newly available 10Mb full size hard drive into the behemoth and format it with an 'active' partition and the IBM DOS 2.1 software.
I was working at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) just north of Oceanside and just south of San Clemente, California. The power plant for San Diego, etc... Now this sounded simple enough and after the hardware was installed, I flipped the red paddle and it whirred to life. Cool!!! Nope, not cool... It would get into the POST and after about 10 seconds or so it just stalled and hung... After I spoke with the Tech-Support folks, who belittled my Tech abilities they said they could not help me until I got the hard drive in, and the low-level format completed long with the partition creation and subsequent formatting. Anyone remember how the LL format was done?**
What I guessed was that the 63watt power supply was not enough to bring the PC up to a bootable state... The first thing the TS guys did me was to again chastise me for not knowing what I was talking about. But I'm a real programmer... I cut my teeth on the IBM 360/370 series Burroughs 1800's and DEC PDP-11 mainframes, using things like IBM ASM, COBOL, FORTRAN 77, JCL, WFL, DCL, X Edit etc... (Any dinosaurs out there just cringed) As well as scoring 100% on the IBM entrance exam. Suffice it to say I was not the on lacking training here.
I was right about the power supply not having the wattage... My test unplugged the two Stadium sized floppies and plugged the hard drive only and it came up but without a system. I bought a 135watt, changed it out and got to watch the system start to boot with the FD's and HD for the first time... At the config.sys it froze... MSTS (Microsoft Tech Support) Said it was the wrong power supply, and the switch settings on the dipswitch were incorrect.... Turned out they were right on that, the book listed all settings backwards. On=Off and Off=on. Also it turns out the default max files that can be open during POST/Boot is 8. With the IBMBIO.SYS, IBMDOS.sys, COMMAND.com, ANSI.sys, along with the Bootstrap files it topped out and the DOS2.1 install diskette did not have a config.sys or the ability to write one on it. I figured out that I could cut my own notch in the boot diskette and then fix me up a config.sys file right on the DOS 2.1 Boot with files=12 buffers=16, cause by the time it got to the config.sys end it could not continue...
But, I could not use edlin to create the file, cause to open it with edlin put you at 11 files open and the buffers would take a dump, so I had to use "copy con config.sys" to create it... After that it was smooth snailing...
**
To create an on the fly CONFIG.SYS, You had to boot DOS and then at the "C>" prompt type:
set path=c:\dos;%path%
set prompt=$p$g$_$
debug
-g=c800:5
at the end of the process the computer would reboot.
(It could also be c800:8 or c800:15 depending on wether you had the Western Digital or Adaptec Hard Drive controller card)
Wait, what was the question? Oh yeah:
Q> Was it troublesome interacting with Microsoft's Fledgling Technical support people?
A> Only if you called them...