pc tech support, page 1

I've seen some genius level activity during the last half of 2010 come through my shop.

A guy brought a laptop in to me (he didn't speak english, so we had this conversation in spanish) and said it wouldn't turn on. He didn't bring a power adapter in with it, so I asked about that. No...I left it at home, he said.
After a while of checking the computer, I concur it either has a bad motherboard, or a bad power jack and the battery is totally discharged. He asks if the "black box" in the middle of the power adapter cord is necessary to the functioning of the laptop. Feeling like I am about to hear the truth finally come out of him, I say that it IS, and why is he asking that. He says that it stopped working, so he cut the plug end off of the adapter, and hardwired the plug directly to the 120V line that he then plugged into the wall. He said..."It was like it was going to work for a second, the lights came on and then there was this noise....."

Another guy brought a laptop in, that would power on and then immediately off. The laptop was a caveman relic, a Compaq E500 (or something like that) that this guy had plugged the power cord for an HP printer in to. The adapter read something like 30V - and the laptop required 19V. I told him that the over voltage had killed the laptop. HE COULD NOT UNDERSTAND THIS. He said that it had BEEN working, just the mouse was erratic, and it made a really high pitched noise. I explained that the noise was the computer equivalent of what you hear when you crack and egg on a hot griddle. He still didn't believe me. I finally told him that I wasn't qualified to fix the issue at hand and that he needed to call Compaq Tech Support.

I sold a laptop to a lady. I showed her the dvd player, the cd burner. I showed her the wireless connection, explained the antivirus software, pointed out the games I had installed on there per her request. We talked about the battery, charging the battery - the warranty & what was covered. She departs. An hour later she calls me and says she has a question about the laptop. "How do you turn it on?"

Terminology. Most people get memory (ram) confused with hard drive storage space. When I say it needs more memory, they nearly always respond with "Well cant you just delete some of that stuff on there?" or they'll say "I need a bigger hard drive, with more memory, because my computer is saying 'virtual memory is low'"
PC Towers are called modems, hard drives, tabletops, towers, boxes.
People have brought in their monitor only, saying it has a lot of viruses in it.
People will spend all night defragging their hard drive to remove viruses.

A business called me yesterday morning, hysterical, none of their computers would get online nor could they connect to their central database. They needed me IMMEDIATELY, please HURRY, they were totally DOWN and had spent three hours on the phone with their ISP to no avail. I drop the hundred things I'm juggling and drive the hour there to find out THEY BOUGHT A NEW ROUTER and didn't tell me about it. Their only problem was that they DIDN'T CONNECT ALL THE COMPUTERS BACK TO THE WIRELESS NETWORK.

Last year a lady brought in a desktop computer for repair, and after three weeks or so came back to pick it up. I grabbed her computer, & booted it up showing that it had been repaired and that all of her data was still intact.
She said that this didn't look like her computer at all, and that was indeed her data, but that was NOT the computer that she brought in. We reviewed the sec camera footage from weeks before and watched as she took the same computer (identifiable by several stickers on the case, and the particular shape of the case) and as I met her halfway and brought the computer inside placing it a mere five feet from another camera. She STILL insisted that wasn't her computer, so we watched the video several more times. The video was perfect, even showing a scrape on the case where the paint was missing that was visible as it came from the trunk of her car to my workbench - and still visible on the computer she claimed wasn't hers.

A guy I had never seen before stuck his head in the door & asked "Can you take the password off this laptop? It's stolen"

A guy brings a computer in, wrecked with viruses - and says "Whatever you do, don't delete my porn...I need that. I need it because my girlfriend is pregnant and fat"

An old man brings a computer in, and says whatever you do - don't delete my Poser files. Poser is a program to manipulate 3d models such as people & animals in various positions & save as files and/or movies.
He had over 50 poser movies he had made of children receiving enemas, and with "worms"
I called the police.