I love saving my family money

[styckx]

It's often annoying being "that guy" in the family.. That guy that is always called when someones computer isn't working right.. But the look of happiness when you fix it, and the nice meal in return pays off for the slight annoyance it is.

Dads been nagging me for a few weeks his PC has been locking up on him with a Windows error, drive error and forcing a shutdown and restart.. It's hard to really assess a situation because the lesser experience people tend to not know the lingo or what's really going on and make up stuff.. Everything he was telling me didn't follow any pattern of what is wrong.. I checked it out.. Nothing seemed out of the oridinary.. Drive checked out etc.. I couldn't get it to crash.. Left it at that..

So, a few days later he calls and says "it won't boot, nothing comes up on the screen"... So...I look at it... Low and behold the PC won't post... Swapped GPU's and it posts, boots.. Did a scandisk.. Drive checks out fine.. Figured we're good to go.. Made sense.. Progressive GPU failure and it finally just died.

Today he calls 4 days later and says it broke again.. "Nothing works... No fans, nothing"... FINALLY! A clear clue of what is wrong.. Power Supply!

Open up the case and the mobo LED light is just flashing.. (it should be steady glowing).. Hit power.. Yep.. Not a thing.. Check connections, all firm.. It's dead Jim.. Rip out the BFG 550W, toss in a spare Antec 750W I had, and the computer is back up and running on the first press of the power button.

Every time I do this I pause and think for a minute "I wonder what kind of heck Best Buy or some other similar place would have put him through for such a simple fix..?"

Anyone else "that guy" in their family?

[PapaXpress]

*raises hand*

Would you believe that one of my machines which I built and was handed down from my wife to my best friend and 10 years later it's still going strong? It was on of the orignal Athlon's 3200(?) with a Nvidia 5200 FX

Lets see:
Wife
Dad
Mom
BF 1
BF 2
BF 3

and I am their IT networking go-to person as well (oooh the nightmares)

[ca2kjet]

Mhmm, all too often, which I'm fine with but I hate coming home from work only to continue with more of the same work. There's only so much tech support I can handle in one day!! AH!! I feel bad for those who are stuck going to Best Buy and the like, especially when you hear what was done to fix someones problem only to learn that they got totally screwed over. Some people have no decency...

[arizonachris]

(raises hand, too) Yep, let's see.
Boss #1, son and sister
Boss #2, wife, two sons
Video stores in Lomita, Gardena, Lawndale, Inglewood, LA City Strip. (these are all point of sale systems)
Roommate
Best friend, his brother (who has a LAN with 4 PC's and a storage server)

Oh, yeah, me, too! I'm down to my main PC and two Folding @ Home PC's (I did have 6 PC's at one time)

Gotta start doing some more repair/ install/ build stuff, Saturday was my last night on my night job.

[Bananarama]

It was on of the orignal Athlon's 3200(?) with a Nvidia 5200 FX

I have an old Athlon XP-2000 PC still chugging away as a backup. Everything, I and I mean EVERYTHING, except the CPU has been replaced in that box. No very fast, but the chip is better than an Energizer battery - it keeps going, and going, and going...

[JimM]

"That Guy" would be me. I even get calls and they expect me to fix it over the phone.

[Chacal]

Thinkgeek.com used to sell a t-shirt with "No, I will not fix your computer" printed on the front.

If you're "that guy", you definitely need to purchase Faronic's DeepFreeze and install it on each of their computer.
That way, everytime they have a problem that is not hardware-related, a reboot will solve it.
Even if they formatted their C: drive, rebooting will put the system back to when you froze it.
I used it in a high scholl where kids would do their best to destroy systems on purpose. This is the only tool that foiled them.

I also use imaging software to keep a full backup of every system I maintain, in case of catastrophic HD failure.

[arizonachris]

I even get calls and they expect me to fix it over the phone.

Oh, yeah, I get that while I'm at work, without my Windows PC in front of me. We use an old butt program that runs on QNX for our Point of Sale video system. So I get a call, "How do I do this? Fix this? " Ack! I'm getting old , I forget a lot of XP stuff. If I'm not in front of one of my XP PC's, sorry. Call me tomorrow. Just don't wake me up from my cat nap.

[styckx]

Old but relevant. This is how I am everytime I have to fix someones computer or teach someone how to do something.

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/ ... burns/2786

[steve_the_slim]

Old but relevant. This is how I am everytime I have to fix someones computer or teach someone how to do something.

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/ ... burns/2786

Oh man. That's pretty much a horror story of everything you're not supposed to do in tech support. I had a teacher in high school who would have loved to use this as an example of what not to do.