A Letter On Behalf of the World's PC Fixers 638
Barence writes "PC Pro's Steve Cassidy has written a letter on behalf of all the put-upon techies who've ever been called by a friend to fix their PC. His bile is directed at a friend who put a DVD bought on holiday into their laptop, and then wondered what went wrong. 'Once you stuck that DVD in there and started saying "yes, OK" to every resulting dialog box, you sank the whole thing,' Cassidy writes. 'It doesn't take 10 minutes to sort that out; it requires a complete machine reload to properly guarantee the infection is history. No, there is no neat and handy way I've been keeping secret that allows you to retain your extensive collection of stolen software licenses loaded on that laptop. I do disaster recovery, not disaster participation.'"
I Play Dumb (Score:5, Informative)
When I got a job writing and supporting industrial software for a pipeline company I started getting "out of touch" with home systems. Requests for assistance started getting replies beginning with, "I don't know if I can help - I haven't really done that kind of work in a while." Horse crap, to be sure, but it worked.
Now I help my parents when they need it, and recently I replaced a keyboard in my sister's laptop - but requests from cousins, aunts, and uncles have long since stopped.
Play dumb. It Works.
Re:Get over it. (Score:2, Informative)
As an accountant, I can tell you that I get asked all the time by friends and relatives if I can do their taxes for free...
As an accountant however I never do anything for free...
Re:One thing is for certain. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about "substantially". I've got a couple of scars from those cheap as shit cases that must have been made by Schick or Gillette.
You call that a rant? HERE'S A RANT! (Score:5, Informative)
Dear [Insert Name Here],
I completely sympathize with your situation, but I will not touch your computer. First off, I can't 'just take a look at it.' If I take a look, I promise that I will find things wrong with it. And then, inevitably, you'll ask me to go from 'just looking' to tweak it. Then after tweaking, full on, sleeves rolled up, virus killing, settings-changing, registry-editing, repair mode. Which is what you wanted all along, isn't it? You don't want me to take a look, you want me to fix everything that's wrong, speed it up, clean up your files and complete advanced maintenance tasks which you can't even pronounce, let alone perform properly. .dll isn't being found by what .exe, which isn't running when another program expects it to be and fails silently with no log file that cascades into a waterfall of failure that rivals Niagara on a good day.
It's a fifty-fifty shot on whether I can fix the computer. I'm not really dealing with 'a computer' here, what I'm dealing with is the combined stupidity of every Redmond employee and every developer, decision-maker, and contractor that worked on any piece of software on your computer. Because the thing starts up and POSTs just fine. I'm the poor sap who has to figure out what
And that's only if it's a real bug! You've probably downloaded cracks, and serial numbers (I see you've got the complete Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Edition installed, that's only $2600, I'm sure you bought a legal license...) and oh, what's this, 13 toolbars in IE! Bonsai Buddy! Password Saver Online! I'm sure all these are totally legit, and none of them are software deliberately trying to mess up your computer. That's a whole other ballgame, not poorly designed software but maliciously designed software that will make you part of a botnet, steal your passwords and let someone watch everything you're doing in real time. I'm sure that's going to be really easy for me to clean up, because I'm an expert in the intricate, retarded, ineffective internal design of the Windows security model.
Let's even say I manage to get your computer into some semblance of working order, after five or six frustrating hours (while you watch TV and relax after your hard day at the Dress Barn.) Pray tell what will I get in return? Maybe if you're generous twenty-five, fifty bucks tops? Not even enough to fill up my gas tank. Would you do something frustrating, something you consider vile and degrading, for $5 an hour after you just got out of a long day of work making way more than that and being much less frustrated and degraded? Let's put it this way, what if I walked up to you and asked, "Hey, why don't you do my laundry? C'mon, most of the time you're not even doing anything, the machine does all the work. And make sure it's folded right! How about you scrub my floors on your hands and knees while I watch from the couch? No? OK, make me some dinner. Nothing too special, just a standard egg and cheese souffle, lobster thermadore in a white wine sauce and chocolate mousse for dessert." You'd answer "No?" Wow, what a surprise.
But besides the insulting pittance and the degradation, what I'm sure you'll give me is the blame if anything ever goes wrong with anything on your computer from now until eternity. (About that dinner, don't worry, I'll buy the parts, er.., ingredients. But I'll blame you if you break a dish or the stove goes out two months later.) Because I messed with it. That's because nothing ever breaks, everything is forever and entropy is just a made-up word. (Who am I kidding, you don't know what entropy is.) That's my thanks for fixing the computer.
On second though, how about I don't fix it and I save myself a huge fscking headache and you keep your fifty bucks?
Re:God I can relate! (Score:5, Informative)
If you can't draw an arc, the transformer is potted in tar and the labor to repair one (if it can even be done) is far more expensive than the replacement. If neither of the above fixes it, you'll have to get a new sign.
The behavior of a switch-mode supply when driving something other than the specified load is somewhat unpredictable, so testing the power supply in that case requires replacement with a known-good part to see if the problem is fixed.
Re:Both of you, behave yourselves! (Score:4, Informative)
WebM did not replace h.264. VP8 replaced h.264. WebM replaced .mp4. WebM is based on Matroska, the superset of .mkv, .mka, and .mks. Turn in your geek card.
Re:I quit using PCs (Score:2, Informative)
yes, yes it does. Welcome to the new millennium. Let me catch you up:
Linux = Linux computer
PC = Windows computer
Mac = Apple Computer
Yeah, you can bitch about the technicality, but in the real world, that is what is said.
only if you run as Administrator (Score:3, Informative)
I am very surprised that nobody has said that this yet.
Number one rule: never login as Administrator (or root), unless you need to do maintenance. Playing a dvd is not maintenance.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/aaron_margosis/archive/2004/06/17/157962.aspx [msdn.com] "Why you shouldn't run as admin..."
So a message to all pc-fixers out there: if your friend does want the automatic login, make sure it automatically logs in to an account that is in the "Users" group. And you could even go as far as not giving the Administrator password to your friend.
If users log in as Administrator when all they want to do is surf the web, write some email, write a document with MS Word or play a dvd. Then do not blame Microsoft if your pc gets hacked. It's your own fault.
This particular article by Aaron Margosis was written seven years ago.