I had a busy day. Two of my oldschool friends both had computer issues to deal with, and I guess, I'm "that guy".
One friend, his Dell-based gaming PC that I built him a few years back, based on a refurb unit from ebay, died on him. He brought it over, I replaced the PSU and swapped the RAM around, still no-go, seems like mainboard failure. Sigh.
So for him, I ordered a refurb HP ProDesk 400 G3 MT, with a Skylake i5-6600 to replace his i5-2400 Dell tower, and I'll move over the drives and GPU, and add some DDR4 RAM for him, then hopefully, his "refurb gaming PC" should be good to go, at a cost far lower than buying a brand-new (even brand-new "refurb") gaming PC.
The other friend was in a tizzy, he had been living with his GF, and let his internet bill slide at his apt., and they had disconnected him and sent him to collections. He was having trouble wrapping his head around the idea that just because he paid his arrears to 'bigISP', that they wouldn't automatically continue his service.
Once I was able to convince him that: 1) he needed to order new service, and 2) him paying that bill wasn't a "waste", because if he hadn't, he wouldn't have been able to order service again at that address, then things went a bit smoother. He called 'bigISP', and spoke to a few people, got set up on another new plan, now he had internet. (Of course, it was maxing at 94Mbit/sec down, and his plan is for 800Mbit/sec down, so that's another problem for another time, I guess.)
Edit: I suspect a cable issue with his wired ethernet, as 94Mbit/sec is a suspicious number, being the theoretical max of a 100Mbit/sec ethernet connection. I ordered a 5-pack of 7' Cat6 cables from Newegg for $12 for him, gratis for him. (I'm always giving out cables to my friends, they're cheap enough I'm not going to hassle them over a couple of bucks. I buy in bulk, generally, anyways.)
But at least, I've felt useful these past few days, been keeping busy.
Edit: The more I think about the ISP issue, the more that I think that it is both a modem config file issue, as well as a modem model issue. The ISP won't upload "crippled" config files. So they're uploading a baseline config file to his modem, because his current modem, I'm pretty sure, being like 2-3 years old at this point, won't support the 800Mbit/sec plan on this ISP, and to get a "proper" 800Mbit/sec config file, he'll need a new modem. Which I actually bought for him, a few months ago, when they had the Arris DOCSIS 3.1 multi-gig (it has a 2.5GbE port on the back) for $40 off, or $160. Hopefully, he can pony up some $$$ to get his full plan speed.