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  • #16
    I remember when I still lived close enough to my parents that my dad thought nothing of calling me up to come fix his computer for him after he borked it. I kept telling him to steer clear of the porn sites and to stop clicking on everything that pops up on his screen, and to stop changing the settings I put in place. I had locked down his computer on him to keep him from being stupid, but he reformatted it to get around what I'd done. That was my last straw - don't call me to fix the damn computer if you refuse to listen to what I am telling you not to do. Especially after he ended up with a boot sector virus that completely borked his machine.

    Last I heard he was fired us a custy by yet another in-home tech...this makes number 7 now. One for each year it's been since I moved away. And he won't go to FutureChop because they 'cost too much' and he doesn't like what they do to his computer. Which is reformat the works and causing him to lose his piles of downloaded porn. And yes, it is porn - he's got a 'bit' of an addiction. Any time I went up to fix his computer I found multiple folders of porn, and his browsing history was primarily porn sites. I'd be nice and scan them before transferring them over to a CD if it was clean, but most of the files gave virus warnings so I dumped them. Which only served to piss him off more.

    Ugh.

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    • #17
      Most of the 'tech support' I do for family these days is related to a conversation like so:

      Family: "Jay, where's the passcode for the wifi?"
      J2K: "In the usual place, on a piece of paper in the cupboard above the old desktop."

      This is because Mom and Sis (whenever she's visiting) both have Macs, which I'm not qualified to troubleshoot, and Dad's laptop is provided by his employer, so any tech support he needs he gets from IT at work.

      Sometimes they'll ask me why the cable isn't working, and that's usually down to Mom pressing the wrong button on the remote and trying to change the channel on the wrong device. (Though that hasn't happened much since we got a new remote after our old one finally stopped working.)

      Mom might be a walking techbane who has more problems with tech misbehaving than anyone else in the family, but she's finally getting savvy enough to do her own troubleshooting. And she's always so proud when she fixes something without my help.
      PWNADE(TM) - Serve up a glass today! | PWNZER - An act of pwnage so awesome, it's like the victim got hit by a tank.

      There are only Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because I choose to walk!

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      • #18
        Quoth EricKei View Post
        Crossbow -- I like the cut of your jib ^_^
        Thanks. The other method I started using to deal with needy family members is the following phrase:

        "I charge $25/hour to fix computers. $50/hour if you want to watch. $100/hour if you want to help. $200/hour if you undo what I already fixed. Half price for family. Triple on Holidays."

        (The last bit was after the 4th family Christmas in a row where my wife and I spend at least 5 hours fixing her brother's machine.)
        "If your day is filled with firefighting, you need to start taking the matches away from the toddlers…” - HM

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        • #19
          At work we added

          Quoth Crossbow View Post
          Thanks. The other method I started using to deal with needy family members is the following phrase:

          "I charge $25/hour to fix computers. $50/hour if you want to watch. $100/hour if you want to help. $200/hour if you undo what I already fixed. Half price for family. Triple on Holidays."

          (The last bit was after the 4th family Christmas in a row where my wife and I spend at least 5 hours fixing her brother's machine.)
          Instead of doubling up we added at work and meant it.

          $75 per hour to fix you computer.

          $0 per hour if you wanted to watch, $50 per hour extra if you wanted to talk/give advice. And yes over twenty years of working there more than a dozen people took us up on the offer.

          $0 per hour if you wanted to work on it yourself, but expect us to take twice as long as the original estimate if you can't fix it. Yes, really! We handed to tools to customers who said they know what they were doing and did not want to pay the tech's time. Their facial expressions were amazing when the tech after giving them the tools walked away to work on something else and REFUSED to come back to give advice.

          While I do not celebrate Christmas, everyone else in the company does. That means if your computer can not be fixed in time for when the store closed for Christmas you don't get it! So why did you wait so long before bringing it in?

          Family get discounts on buying new hardware and software but no discounts for tech service.

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          • #20
            I had a couple happen to me...

            Background: I am the most computer-savvy in my immediate family, as I work with them daily and program for a living. However, to my mother, and others not as tech savvy, that translates into "He knows about computers", which apparently means I know EVERYTHING about computers...

            Story the First
            I own a t-shirt that says, "No, I will not fix your computer." I have it for a reason.

            Anyway, one day I wore it to my mother's house, sort of as a joke (since she usually called me for the same tech problems over and over again). My wife and I are there less than half an hour, when my mother's husband says, out loud, "I know you're wearing that t-shirt, but..."

            No. I didn't fix his computer.

            Story the Second
            My mother wanted to meet My wife and I at a fast food place after a High School football game one night. So we go to the fast food place, and we sit there and eat. Afterward, while we're walking to our car, my mother walks over to her car, calls us over, and tries to hand me a complete stranger's computer. Turns out she'd told some lady that she worked with at the time that her son "knows computers", and since the lady's computer was borked, I could put MY version of Windows on it for her...from MY CD.

            The Mrs. shot that one down. She said that we didn't have any convenient outlets to plug it into.

            I jokingly told my wife that it would have been amusing to put Ubuntu Linux on it and give it back to the lady. That would have caused all sorts of confusion. My wife pointed out that in that case it would have been WORSE, because the lady wouldn't have wanted that, and if there was a problem, I would have been called even more.

            Story the Third
            I would get calls from my mother because her husband was either messing with her, or didn't want her seeing things he was doing. They had TWO computers on a network at her house. She would always ask me to help her plug everything back in. I told her on numerous occasions to "Label the cables". She never did. I quit helping. They divorced anyway, so it became moot.

            Story the Fourth
            Mother calls me one day, telling me something is wrong with her computer (one that came standard with a 3.5" floppy drive). I was in the middle of something, so the call rolled to voicemail. I called her back a few hours later, and she was MAD, MAD, I tell you, because she tried to "fix" the issue herself, and messed up the machine. What ticked me off about THIS is that she blamed me for it.

            The problem? She'd left the floppy in the drive when she rebooted, and didn't understand what "Non-System Disk or Disk Error" meant.

            My wife was SUPER mad about that one. She typed up a somewhat cathartic (to her) email to my mother, but never sent it. Well, My wife sent it to me but not to my mother.

            I really did, at one point, consider doing what others here have done. Just mention a price per hour to fix it. That probably would have ended a lot of these. Maybe.
            Last edited by mjr; 11-21-2014, 05:23 PM.
            Skilled programmers aren't cheap. Cheap programmers aren't skilled.

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            • #21
              Quoth mjr View Post
              Mother calls me one day, telling me something is wrong with her computer (one that came standard with a 3.5" floppy drive). I was in the middle of something, so the call rolled to voicemail. I called her back a few hours later, and she was MAD, MAD, I tell you, because she tried to "fix" the issue herself, and messed up the machine. What ticked me off about THIS is that she blamed me for it.
              My dad has screamed at me over that damn computer of his. Nearly every failure is because "someone did something" to it. I'm actually at the point of going down there with my 40-pound fence maul, and "hitting any key to continue."

              When he bought that piece of shit, he asked both my brother and I as to what to get. We both picked out a few systems to look at. Most of them were "too expensive," so he bought a bare-bones HP. Before signing off on it, he asked us if it would do what he wanted. We said that it would--it's fine for spreadsheets and word processing, and surfing the web, but he'd be better off buying one with a bit more power. Now he's pissed because it sucks at playing DVDs and most games.

              He's also pissed that my putting my "security suite" (Spybot, Malwarebytes, Autoruns, and M$ Security Essentials) has "fucked it up." Really? When I put those programs on the computer *last year* that thing took about 15 minutes to boot up. The registry was trashed, it was flooded with spyware, trojans, and viruses...and the things that I installed to remove that shit is causing the problem?

              No, I think it's a PEBKAC error
              Aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines. --Enzo Ferrari

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              • #22
                Best thing I've ever found for putting on a computer that I do not want trashed? Ubuntu. The only issue I'm having at present is I switched routers and it's giving me crap connecting to it. But no matter how hard they try, the kids cannot @#$#@$ it up to the point of a rebuild .
                But the paint on me is beginning to dry
                And it's not what I wanted to be
                The weight on me
                Is Hanging on to a weary angel - Sister Hazel

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                • #23
                  Nah. Ubuntu is too mainstream. Use Slackware.

                  My dad's computer runs XP Home (). I wish I could put him on some linux distro, but it's an older machine (single core) and I would need to be reasonably sure the scanner and wireless printer would work, and essentially that the biggest change would be seeing / instead of \ in the file manager.

                  My mom used to be a source of much computer pain. A Chromebook solved that though. Haven't had to fix anything for her since I got it. I just wish that you could actually plug a printer directly in--it only prints via Google Cloud Print.
                  Supporting the idiots charged with protecting your personal information.

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                  • #24
                    *sigh*

                    Guess I'm a sucker... My wife and I are now trying to de-virus our niece's laptop. The main reason we're doing it is that's where the pictures of our newborn grand-niece are.

                    At least, I hope it's just a virus...
                    "If your day is filled with firefighting, you need to start taking the matches away from the toddlers…” - HM

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                    • #25
                      Quoth otakuneko View Post
                      A Chromebook... I just wish that you could actually plug a printer directly in--
                      Crouton. Running Trusty on my chromebook right now.

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                      • #26
                        Quoth Crossbow View Post
                        *sigh*

                        Guess I'm a sucker... My wife and I are now trying to de-virus our niece's laptop. The main reason we're doing it is that's where the pictures of our newborn grand-niece are.

                        At least, I hope it's just a virus...
                        make sure the pics are clean then nuke the drive.
                        I AM the evil bastard!
                        A+ Certified IT Technician

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                        • #27
                          Quoth lordlundar View Post
                          make sure the pics are clean then nuke the drive.
                          That's actually not too far off from what I plan on doing, depending on the severity of the infection...
                          If I can boot in safe mode and run a portable copy of AVG/Avats and Malwarebytes, I'll clean the drive and give it back intact.

                          If I can't boot in safe mode, then I boot using a Linux CD, copy the pics to a thumb drive, clean them using an isolated PC, and then secure wipe the drive.

                          If it's some form of Ransomware, then she's SOL.
                          "If your day is filled with firefighting, you need to start taking the matches away from the toddlers…” - HM

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