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Stupid windows 98 customer

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There is still a lot of Win 98 out there, especially in the public schools where they don't have the cash to upgrade to the latest and greatest every year. Fortunately MS drove a stake through the heart of it by ceasing all support and updates last June so this is the last year I am stuck dealing with them. We have around 150 Win 98 workstations in my school that I am still stuck supporting but none of them take that long to boot, even the 64MB ones come up completely in under 3 minutes.
 
This is where I would just tell them.. "look.. I'm not going to fix this because it will never be reliable. Also, this entire system isn't worth the time that will be billed to you. I'll recover your data - Leave your hard drive over night"

then I'd turn it off, yank the hard drive, stick it in a test computer, attempt surface repair, save the data, and hand them their data on a set of dvds or charge them for a new hard drive

Part of running a successful computer business is being able to identify when repairing old hardware is cost-prohibitive and when you can serve a customer much better by asking them to put their money into new hardware instead of repairing it.

There's a lot of people still around that think a new computer always costs $2000.. so they're willing to run an 8-yo piece of sh!t into the ground instead of buying a new one.
 
Originally posted by: brxndxn
This is where I would just tell them.. "look.. I'm not going to fix this because it will never be reliable. Also, this entire system isn't worth the time that will be billed to you. I'll recover your data - Leave your hard drive over night"

then I'd turn it off, yank the hard drive, stick it in a test computer, attempt surface repair, save the data, and hand them their data on a set of dvds or charge them for a new hard drive

Part of running a successful computer business is being able to identify when repairing old hardware is cost-prohibitive and when you can serve a customer much better by asking them to put their money into new hardware instead of repairing it.

There's a lot of people still around that think a new computer always costs $2000.. so they're willing to run an 8-yo piece of sh!t into the ground instead of buying a new one.
Click to expand...


I was just thinking of doing that, I stoped billing them one hour in. Took 37mins to boot up, and another 5 for the start menu to load.
 
Make a ghost image of the install, and ask them if they want a restore image (for extra charge, of course). Smart on both your part and theirs.
 
the P233s with 32MB of RAM and Win2k don't take that long to boot up.

And they have dick-freeze to load as well.
 
something has to be very wrong with it. i had a p133 w/ 48 ram notebook running win98 and i don't think it took 5 minutes to boot and that was with a virus scanner.

for the longest time it would take 5 minutes to boot up my winxp box (amd 2600+, 768 ram, scsi hd) on my winxp box... but i found out that it was a usb hub or my scanner plugged in that essentially froze it for a few minutes. unplugged all usb devices and it booted up quickly.
 
It took 37min to come up, 5 min to open the Start bar, I called the guy, asked if anything was valuable on the HD, he said no. I formated, tried it, same problem, switched out memory, same problem, tried a new hd, same problem, after I had swicthed everything out, re-installed the Bios, and boom, works. Only billed the guy 3 hours 🙂 and told him to install an antivirus next time.
 
Originally posted by: sonz70
It took 37min to come up, 5 min to open the Start bar, I called the guy, asked if anything was valuable on the HD, he said no. I formated, tried it, same problem, switched out memory, same problem, tried a new hd, same problem, after I had swicthed everything out, re-installed the Bios, and boom, works. Only billed the guy 3 hours 🙂 and told him to install an antivirus next time.
Click to expand...

MS stopped supporting win98, you should too.
 
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