Do I know that kind of story.

I still have friends who call on me to help them with their PC woes. The latest tale is one who called me complaining that her Windows was excruciatingly slow. We chatted for a while and I came to the conclusion that I had to check things out for myself.

When she brought me the laptop, upon launching it I immediately saw that she had two different anti-virus products installed. When I asked her why, she answered : "but if I have two, I'm twice as protected".

If only.

I proceeded to uninstall one of them while explaining : "You hire two maids, but you only have one broom. They're going to fight over who gets the broom and, during that time, the cleaning doesn't get done."

I try not to let on that I know anything about computers (and some would say I'm right).

Back in the days of dial-up, my mum would often call to say "the internet isn't working again".

I could sometimes get things going by guiding her to look at various settings, but sometimes a "site visit" would be necessary - which was a 350 mile round trip for me (though I did get decent food and lodging).

The cause was usually tracked down to my dad "changing things because I thought it would make it faster", which was "fixed" permanently by creating an admin account with an "unknown" password and removing admin rights from the others.

Back in the days of dial-up, my mum would often call to say "the internet isn't working again". 'Well, of course it isn't working! You're on the phone with me!'

I have many tales of the tech illiterate... But the best one is a friend begging me to take a look at his laptop because it was 'running slow'

Upon booting it up, which took a few minutes, I got him to log into windows and it took a few more minutes before it was fully ready.

I looked at the right side of the taskbar and was greeted with more icons than you'd ever want to see on a 1024x768 display, with even more hidden.

Everything was running all the time, programs he used once in a millenium... background service.

I went through everything, disabling services, getting rid of 90% of the bloat so that things would only be active when he started the software.

After I was finished, I checked his browser and found half a dozen toolbars added for various things, so I got rid of those.

I went through and cleaned up some other start up stuff that wasn't needed, disabled and removed some MS bloatware that was never used or needed on a non corporate/enterprise machine.

When I was finished, it loaded 5x quicker, and was far more responsive when doing basic tasks.

I presented it back to him, with an explanation of what I'd done... which was my first mistake.

He got very indignant and annoyed, that I'd messed with 'HIS' computer in that way, it wasn't what he'd asked me to do. Trying to explain that you don't need 25 services and background programs running 100% of the time sucking up all of your resources... fell on deaf ears.

That was the last time I ever offered to help him, and it likely won't come as a surprise to hear that I ended our friendship a year or two later after he used the recent death of my brother as a weapon to justify and excuse his own shitty behaviour and trolling on my car club forums.

Shitty people, act like shitty people and sometimes one incident is enough to bring all their past shitty behaviour into sharp focus.

Aside from my immediate family, I refuse to do tech support for friends and neighbours any more.

> Aside from my immediate family, I refuse to do tech support for friends and neighbours any more.

Same here. It appears that, for some people, "I can take a quick look" sounds remarkably similar to "I will be your sysadmin forever for free", if not "any problem this machine develops from now on will be my fault".

So, just to make sure, I do not say "I can take a quick look" anymore, preferring "You should take it to a shop" instead.

I do tech support for all my friends and family ... as long as they aren't running Redmond or Cupertino operating systems.

Strangely enough, the folks that I have convinced to run the cut-down version of Slackware that I first built for MeDearOlddMum almost never feel the need to call me for help ... and when they do, it's almost always installing a new printer, which can be handled over the phone in most cases these days.

No? Obvious then that I don't do windows. ;)

I only do thems with inodes missus as I lost my rag with Windows nigh on forty year ago.

I successfully trained my environment not to ask me for any PC or mobile phone issues. "I understand IT. And I do not know anything about your pesky desktop computer, modem, phone etc."

(Only exception to that might be if missus has an issue.)

"only replaced the motherboard."

That's a scoop to me: a user who is able to do that and then successfully go past BIOS onto at least trying to boot, and the same user is not aware that all internals have now changed ! Wow, what a dude ! I've never met any of those ... Surely showed some skills albeit with a tiny gap in the software department :)

"therefore often asked to help out with errant PCs."

I'd rather say rodent or ferral PCs :)

... called me out to "fix my broken Windows, please" back in the days of WfW 3.11, so probably early '95 or thereabouts.

I checked the file containing lists of family computer hardware, grabbed the necessary installation media, and my surfboard[0], and headed off to Bonnydoon where he lived. On arrival, I grabbed a beer and went into the office and flipped on the machine. Sure enough, it refused to boot ... just hung with a continuous "beeeeeeeeee", with nothing on-screen to tell me what was wrong.

Diving under the desk, I immediately discovered the problem. It wasn't the generic custom computer I had built and installed a year or so earlier. In fact, it was a rather expensive IBM model.

I looked up from under the desk and said something like "WTF‽‽‽".

It turned out that his boss had put a new computer on his desk pre-loaded with some proprietary program or other, and told him to junk the "old" one. The"old" one was only six months old, and obviously newer than the one I had built, so he brought it home and switched the two. He turned it on, it yelled at him, and he turned it off and called me.

I looked around the office, and no other computer. Lovely. I asked where the one I had built went. He said he had thrown it away ... so I bolted down the drive muttering expletives in his general direction, lifted the lid on his garbage can, and there it was, sitting on top of two weeks worth of household trash. Dusted it off, swapped it out with the IBM, and he was back in business. Thankfully.

The necropsy on the IBM showed it to be an older model, with much less ability than the machine I built for him. Some components had rattled loose on the drive from Sunnyvale to Bonnydoon, thus the hang on boot. After re-seating boards and components, and re-uniting it with its original IBM mouse, keyboard and monitor (and adding the junk speakers from the other computer) it was plenty good enough to run his Wife and kid's AOL account, so that's what we ended up doing with it. No harm, no foul, everybody happy.

[0] You'd take your board if you were driving from Palo Alto to almost Davenport Landing, right?

If anyone's interested AOL is still a thing, it's a modern program but still looks like it did about 20 years ago and still says "you've got mail". It doesn't give you internet access but it appears to be [1]some kind of combined browser/mail/thing which sells you subscriptions to unnecessary software .

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUsym8iAWHY

>I looked up from under the desk and said something like "WTF‽‽‽".

Nice use of the Interrobang. A much underused punctuation mark.

Probably my biggest surprise was when I moved the Win10 system drive from a deceased Intel PC to an AMD workstation - except for some SSDs, the power supply and the case with all new hardware. Just for the laughs I switched on the new computer. And Windows booted without any hiccup.

Ah yes the days of W95 in the corporate environment where users could (and, ahem, I did) do literally whatever they wanted. In particular, I could run Windows Update and install the graphics driver it said it needed. Wrong, wrong, wrong, so wrong it caused a BSOD. That taught me never ever to install drivers off Windows Update to this day. Luckily I was on good terms with the IT department so we just put it down to something I should never do ever again.

The last time I worked full-time in an office was 2008. The desktop PC supplied was fairly well locked down; it wasn't bad, but the company ran Lotus Notes (for shared user data and email). Part of my work needed software that wasn't part of the corporate suite, and access to websites that their security system blocked (and no exceptions were permitted). So I had my own laptop on my desk beside the company PC; of course, that one wasn't allowed to connect to the company network, so I had a data card and SIM plugged in. Actually, personal laptops weren't, strictly, allowed either, but my boss needed the work done and, not only turned a blind eye to my personal hardware, also covered the SIM contract on my expenses (usually under "mileage" as that didn't require receipts). Files were transferred between my laptop and desktop (to access the printers) was via floppynet (USB sticks were frowned upon but 3.5" stiffies we redeemed OK)!

One of the jobs I had to do was to redocument the company accounting system in preparation for an audit to permit US public listing (I had less that two months to do it and the only way to meet the deadline was to use a proprietary process mapping package a friend of mine had developed). I handed over a folder with around 40 process maps to the financial controller just over a month later - who then told me that they'd decided not to list after all (but that decision wasn't to be made public just yet). A month wasted? Not really: I got paid for the work, my pal got paid for the software and we had proven how much time and money was being wasted on the big consultancies.

That was well off-topic...

Or, as one of my lusers did, make their screen options white script on a white background.

One of the great strengths of being able to boot from a 3.5" floppy, demonstrated right there.

I have a friend who admits he is 'computer-literate' but knows his limits. Apparently my experience is superior and my suggestion that he update his very old computer was met by "Can you just have a quick look at it?" I didn't need a quick look but he persisted. Eventually this was causing some friction between us so my son who was just starting his career in IT (another story) volunteered to review the old computer and he took it away for a complete inspection.

My son is a better diplomat than I am. At his own cost, he replaced the motherboard and updated the software but in keeping the carcass it was ostensibly the same PC. He didn't mention the new internals. Response: "I said it only needed a clean-up."

Twenty years on, that PC is still in use, monitoring his wildlife cameras.

In about 2014, a friend popped down to visit from Scotland, a 250m trip each way.

When he arrived, he had a computer with him, a large beige box... His boss had given it too him, and he wondered if I'd take a look and see if he could upgrade it as it was rather slow.

I opened the side panel, looked inside and laughed.

It was a Pentium II, probably a 350mhz... the one with the Slot A processor... I was about 18yrs old at that point. I don't think they'd even started using AGP slots for graphics at the time, and SD ram.

I told him to either keep it as a time capsule of old computers and run windows 95-98 on it as a retro gaming PC that was never to be connected to the internet... or junk it.

Over the years, I have kept him supplied with PC gear as I upgrade and replace parts... Some I sell at bargain basement prices, others I simply give him. He's usually about 4-5yrs behind the curve, the last 'upgrade' I gave him was an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X a couple of years ago when I replaced it with a 5600G in my mediaserver. He's still running that and my old 5700XT GPU to this day.

'I was about 18yrs old at that point'

Was meant to be 'It was about 18yrs old at that point'

But when the PII 350 was released, I think I was about 18yrs old... So it kinda works both ways. :)

My younger brother brought me an ex-workplace desktop Dell PC to look at. Looked quite nicely built, and he said it was a decent spec. (at least compared to what he was using at the time).

I opened it, and had a quick play, trying various things to get it to start, to no avail. Would not start from another disk, or from optical media. Did not even get into the BIOS IIRC, even with another power supply.

I decided that the Mobo had failed, and then looked to sourcing a replacement. I took a quick look at the config and size of the board, and then did a double-take. Everything on the board was in the wrong place, sort of mirror image to that on an ATX motherboard!

Turns out Dell used BX motherboards, something I didn't even know existed. At the time (and probably even now) replacement BX motherboards were like hen's teeth, so I recommended replacing the whole machine including the case, possibly keeping the disk to aid with data recovery if there was anything on it he wanted to recover, and the memory if it was compatible with his new system.

As far as I'm concerned PC support takes the form of installation of Linux.

It does seem that users have less success buggering up Linux, even if there's only a single user account with admin rights.

Hopefully someone can offer an amusing tale of where relatives or friends have buggered up a perfectly functional Linux install.

Simply don't give them the root password. Don't even tell them it exists. What they don't know can't hurt them.

Or give it to them, but do it vocally ... "And your root password is 4r5t6y7u [0], don't forget it!" They hear "blah, blah, blah, ::insert technical stuff here::, blah blah blah" and promptly forget you ever said anything. Anyone who takes the initiative to actually write it down can probably learn the basics and not break too much.

[0] Not a real password. Hopefully.

I was part of a team supporting a world wide games event. We got a text saying one machine is slow to the point of it takes seconds for the mouse to catch up. We then got a text from our manager, and our manager's manager etc up the chain, because "an alert had been generated to the organising committee of the game"

It took an hour to get to the venue. The person at the venue said both these machines were slow. This one has your product - this one does not... and they are both slow. We reported your product as the culprit because we knew we would get great support. This was a clue

My colleague looked to see what was going on. It's anti virus scan was running continually and hammering the I/O. Instead of once a day at midnight, the people at the venue thought it would be "safer" to run antivirus scan continually.

The scan time was reset - and the problem went away. We did get a public apology from the head person!