The Most frustrating thing you deal with when working on other people's computers.

[highland145]

Helping my parents are ok. The worst I've found was an ask toolbar that comes with Java. But my mother can now edit her own movies from her camcorder and burn them to DVDs. Otherwise I just help her with her smartphone which she's really happy about. I've recently moved all their important files to a SkyDrive folder.
Last time I helped my sister she actually found the problem before me, so that is also fine.

I have a friend though who call with a shrill voice if her computer is acting up, and want me to tell if it is broken. Quite difficult to say over the phone...

Aren't you supposed to be in Israel?

 

[child of wonder]

*shudder* Working on PCs......

My mom knows a married couple who work in real estate and they occasionally ask me for PC help. I told the guy I wanted $100/hr to help. He wanted to negotiate it down to $50/hr and I just flat out told him anything less than $100/hr just isn't worth my time. Working on PCs for computer illiterate people is more difficult and frustrating (due to the people) than any of the other work I do with my full time job.

 

[Exterous]

Aren't you supposed to be in Israel?

Didn't the police tell you to stop stalking as much?

 

[highland145]

Didn't the police tell you to stop stalking as much?

You're just mad I won't come to Michigan in the winter.

 

[Exterous]

You're just mad I won't come to Michigan in the winter.

Mad? Its the only time I get any rest!

 

[SparkyJJO]

I work in the field and yeah sometimes I get really frustrated. But over all I'm OK with it and don't usually have much of a problem.

Maybe I just have a lot of patience. Usually. Some days I don't.

 

[Fritzo]

This is why I love the cloud.

New PC? Install Chrome, sign in with your email address, BOOM- there's all your stuff. This may be why so many businesses are switching to Google Apps.

 

[Puppies04]

I built a pc for a friend of a family member a few weeks ago. His was running XP and was so slow because of the amount of dodgy toolbars/programs/slow HDD that I said it would be better to build a new one.

Built him one with a SSD and windows 7 and took it round to his house, gave him a quick chat about not installing "super multi CC cleaner+ 11" or "defragtasticspeedupyoursystem" then started installing his drivers. Anyway I ran out of time before I installed his printer drivers and set his favourites up for him (yes he really needed me to do that) so I said I would come back the tomorrow.

Next day I turn up and beofre I do anything else I decide to have a quick look at his installed programs because I have a hunch he is an idiot. Cue conversation...

"How long were you on the PC last night?"
"About an hour after you left"
"Have you been on it today"
"Nope"
"What did you do on the PC after I left?"
"Nothing I went on ebay real quick then logged off"
"Why do you have 14 new programs installed on your PC then"
"No idea you must have installed them"
"........"

Best thing is this was after installing firefox and adblocker in an attempt to slow down his inevitable build up of "must have" fix it programs that speed up your pc even though the thing booted to desktop faster than litterally any other PC I have ever built.

I installed the drivers, uninstalled the crap then left him to it, I won't be going back.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Yeah, I got around that issue by telling everyone I only work on Macs :awe:

Exactly. And then when they actually come to you for Mac help I say "I don't know, take it to a the genius bar." This alone has made my Christmases much better.

Only time now I will work on someone's computer voluntarily is if they want to upgrade to a SSD.

 

[highland145]

Mad? Its the only time I get any rest!

Don't feel bad. You aren't the only one that can't quite me.

 

[akahoovy]

All the semen under the keys.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

This is why I love the cloud.

New PC? Install Chrome, sign in with your email address, BOOM- there's all your stuff. This may be why so many businesses are switching to Google Apps.

Not us.

"Storing our proprietary source code and trade secrets on a competitor's servers. Good idea or bad idea?"

 

[mmntech]

How fucking slow they are.

Takes 3 minutes to boot. Everybody always has about 1,000 processes running on start up. Memory is all used. Takes 30-60 seconds to open an internet browser. My desktop from 2003 with 1gb of ram and Windows 7 ultimate should not be faster than 2013 laptops lol.

My mom is the exact opposite of this. She says to me her computer is booting slow. I'll look at it's the same as it's always been, but she insists it's slow and maybe the disk is getting full. She has a 1TB hard drive on it and I don't think she has even a gig of her own files on top of the OS.

Then I offer to install an SSD for her and she says she doesn't want me messing around with it.

 

[Wyndru]

Like a few have mentioned before, I don't like the whole taking ownership of people's PC problems. It seems once you touch a computer once, it's your problem from that date on.

Regarding the OP's issue...I just backup complete profiles anytime I need to do a re-image, that is anything other than large collections of videos or music that isn't needed or would take too much time to restore. I hold onto the data for about a week and then follow-up to find out if I can delete it.

If the user is especially difficult to deal with I'll even take a screenshot of their desktop before-hand, because they love to tell you things were "right on their desktop" before you imaged it.

I gave up trying to convince people to organize long ago, and I've seen employees get fired for losing data, so I'm not playing that game.

 

[biostud]

Aren't you supposed to be in Israel?

Been walking the entire day so I needed to relax a bit.

 

[Midwayman]

Most people shouldn't have admin rights to their own computer. They should be in a low privledge user account that prevents them from screwing things up too badly. My wife should have a user account get really really angry if she can't install weird web plugins that are 99% spyware.

 

[Fritzo]

Not us.

"Storing our proprietary source code and trade secrets on a competitor's servers. Good idea or bad idea?"

Oh come on, of course a cloud model doesn't work for some companies, but 97% of companies in the US are small businesses (actual number- didn't make that up), so a cloud service will work out for the majority of people.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Oh come on, of course a cloud model doesn't work for some companies, but 97% of companies in the US are small businesses (actual number- didn't make that up), so a cloud service will work out for the majority of people.

Screw the cloud.

 

[highland145]

Been walking the entire day so I needed to relax a bit.

How far is that...Denmark to Israel....

 

[monkeydelmagico]

The most frustrating thing is trying to make family and friends understand that I HATE working on your computers. Most of them have stopped asking.

 

[biostud]

How far is that...Denmark to Israel....

Been walking in circles in the old part of Jerusalem.

 

[Exterous]

Been walking in circles in the old part of Jerusalem.

You'll never get back to Denmark if you can't even walk your way out of Jerusalem. Buy a GPS already!

 

[Jeff7]

Yeah when people tell me to just remove the malware, I try to explain that it's not that simple. If a PC has been infected for so long (usually with a Trojan Horse of some kind), you reach a point to where god only knows what is fucked up on it. You can obliterate all of the malware, but you know that it probably infected tons of system files and settings that will make a PC run like crap. By far the easiest and best thing to do is a wipe the HDD and start over.

That's why alot of these system backups arent that effective because eventually you reach a point to where it's backed up all of your malware too unless you wanna go back several months but then you lose whatever you have accumulated in that time frame.

There was a fun one that would do something to corrupt the TCP/IP stack or some such thing. Ripping out the malware disabled your computer's network capabilities.


I'm thinking that we don't necessarily need a federal law to have malware writers executed.
They'll just be deported to Texas.
Then Texas can obligingly make it legal to execute malware writers.

I had a guy that screwed up his computer at least once every month or two. He payed me well and never hovered over my shoulder. He'd just go watch TV while I fixed it. I finally gave him a simple rule to follow. If you get a popup or prompt of any kind and you don't know what to do, CTRL ALT DEL and kill your browser. If it still won't go away, reboot the computer.

He hasn't had a problem with his computer since. I should have kept my damn mouth shut.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Oh come on, of course a cloud model doesn't work for some companies, but 97% of companies in the US are small businesses (actual number- didn't make that up), so a cloud service will work out for the majority of people.

Oh, I know.

 

[biostud]

You'll never get back to Denmark if you can't even walk your way out of Jerusalem. Buy a GPS already!

One of the good thing about having a Windows Phone, is that you have access to offline maps of the entire world. And it's the only reason I'm not still wandering around in the old part of Jerusalem.