Dumb stuff people do on their computers

What Truly Amazes Me Is.......

That any shipping method or company was able to override the computer's natural homing instinct to return to it's native soil in Taiwan for spawning.

Well I went out to a guy just recently, he had a PC, about 3 years old, now as far as he can remember he has never actually ever used the "add/remove programs" section of the PC, or do any kind of housekeeping on the PC, its used by the family and has 5 accounts on it and it was running slower than XP on a 486 with 32meg of memory, im talking initial load time to welcome screen of some 10 minutes, then a further 5 minutes to load the desktop, needless to say to combat this they never actually ever rebooted it just used the fast switcher option to change accounts.

Well I arrived at his house at 7pm and set to work, im not kidding the PC had 18 items down by the clock, the add/remove section was so long it was twice as long as the screen and his desktop was barely visible due to icons.

It took 2 hours just to remove the programs, use MSCONFIG to disable items loading at startup and finally go into Explorer and delete all the old leftover folders found after a bad uninstall.

The amazing thing was, there wasnt a hint of spyware of viruses on the computer, this may have been due to his AV or just dam good luck.

Then came time to defrag the drive, when I ran the analysis of the drive it was so badly fragmented that I knew if I stayed until completion it was likely to be midnight before I left.

I left instructions on what to do and returned the next evening.

Load time now 1.30 minutes (ok still slow but better) and time to desktop load is about 30 seconds ( a vast improvement) I had him delete all the old profiles and start again (some of the profiles had large amounts of old data).

The point im making here is that most problems people face is down to sheer ignorance, born from going into places like PC world and the like and just buying a PC, without any idea of the things that are needed to be done to make sure the PC that has just cost them a considerable amount of money stays in top condition.

Now these places know full well that most of them will be back sooner or later and fleece them for a fortune.

Regards

Your article is no surprise at all. I've had numerous customers who don't take care of their comp. Yes, it's usually spyware from not using the proper utilities, but I've had simple neglict.

I had one customer who had bad spyware, cleaned it up, told his sons to stop using the p2p filesharing and left a maintenance checklist. Two months later, I'm back at their place as the comp was chaulk full of spyare again! Not only that, but some malware disabled all 3 anti-spyware utilities I installed for them! No one did any maintenance and continued to use the p2p filesharing. Fine, you can keep paying me every 2 months to do this! It's not like I didn't advise you on how to prevent this!

which reminds me of a time my mother sent some mail to a friend in Belgium and it wound up going to BOLIVIA. Starts with a B, 7 letters.... hmmmm...

Her friend got the letter 7 months later.

The best offense is a good defense....

For really important communiques I recommend sending a second letter to alert the person that the first letter is on the way. The law of averages favors a shotgunning technique.

About 1 year ago I was having problems with my computer being slow and I went in BIOS and underclocked my processor

Got somebody in a mom-and-pop joint I was working in that came in with his whole computer and told me his "pointer" wouldn't move. Turned out his mouse was a ball mouse, and it had no ball in it. Now, we kept a supply of 'em on reserve, and I wanted to get get fired anyways so I could enjoy the rest of summer break so I turned to the guy and said "Now, as much as I like using company money to give you something for free that you should have brought yourself- next time you bring this computer in for this stupid crap, bring a ball or two"

Edited by Poertner_1274: Please watch your language
Edited by thebaronjocelin: I tried to give it the punchline I intended while keeping it obscenity-free. If I didn't do a good enough job, just ask me to remove the post. Thank you for your efforts to keep TechSpot cool for all users.

You're Being Too Hard on Yourself......

Like wouldn't that give the RAM and HDD chance to catch up?

Im still puzzling this one out...

Soo my effort to fix my computer was actually a decent thing to do? Damn shows how much I know about computers
Also back to the topic at hand. I remember a few years back my friends and I took a bat to a CRT monitor. It was stupid but fun

The pathway to mental health is arduous indeed.....

Again, here's an example of a proactive, worthwhile effort at reducing stress and thereby redirecting ones attention, focus if you will, at giving the surviving part of the system the attention it deserves. Especially after the monitor gave it's last full measure of devotion.

Yeah but they should have touched the capacitors to see if there was any charge left!

Ow.

But it would be fun to take a shotgun to a CRT monitor. Of course, I'd leave the glass cleanup for somebody else.

Like the 3 year girl who posted all Daddy's credit cards into the floppy drive slot. Daddy then reported them all lost. I found them a week later when they asked me to fix the floppy. Moral - don't let 3 year old wimmin near computers or credit cards!

i took a friends computer without his harddrive and when i installed a hard drive that i got from the same guy ...all i can say is a whole lot of beeeping ..

I summoned the awesome power of ESD to obliterate my motherboard. Grounding is for the weak.



















...And the smart :dead:

It's like a movie......

Sparks fly out of your Fingers? Zowie, you're like the emperor in Star Wars.

My neighbor's computer did the same thing!

It took literally 2 hours to boot up and let all the programs load everything, I installed all the anti virus / anti spyware stuff howard told me to and found over 3800+ viruses and spyware, then I looked into the Add / remove section and the little scoll bar was so small that it took about 5 minutes to go from the top of the list to the bottom. ( It was a 800gig hard drive )

Took about 4 hours to uninstall most of the unneeded crap like MSN, AIM, LimeWire and BearShare, only got paid $15

Tales of Treachery and Deceit

The optimist would say, "Oh, well at least I got paid". Where I live people think a handshake is an overcharge.
In any event this post seems slightly misplaced, but then again, we don't have a thread for "Rude things a******* do to computer technicians

But did you get any beer?!?! :slurp: