I had a new customer referred to me recently — this time from a professor in my Masters Degree program that I’ve kept in touch with over the years. The customer was having difficulties after having several IT-savvy acquaintances of hers attempt to straighten out her machine. Whether or not they made things better or worse, I couldn’t really tell, but her machine was definitely messed up in a major way. It was like being a doctor inheriting a patient that had work done by other doctors with no record of what they had done (or why).

The client herself was an interesting person. Before I even came by, we spoke on the phone for roughly an hour, after which I actually knew less about her computer situation than I did before the call. She kept talking in circles and wouldn’t stay on topic. I knew I was in for a challenge, and I’m not even talking about the computer. She talked about various sessions she’d had with AOL support and Microsoft support (I’m guessing she spent a small fortune on paid support, because you can’t get Microsoft phone support for free).

As soon as I walked in the door, I knew I was right about thinking this would be an “interesting” gig. She had stacks and stacks of folders and pages spread out in her living room. She actually took the time to print out screen shots of every single (I am not exaggerating) error message she had ever encounter during the life of her machine (there were hundreds of pages). I have never encountered anything like that. She just kept handing me different pages with different error messages, in no particular order. My response was to tell her the best approach was to pick the top 2-3 problems, which I would then focus on first.

Her PC was older — a white-box special running Windows 2000 SP4, and, gasp — she was an AOL user! I managed to clean up some things and got her external USB drive working, but I could tell this PC was living on borrowed time. She actually had to run it with the side of the case removed, otherwise it would overheat! I told her that what I was doing amounted to stopgap measures, and that she should seriously consider getting herself a new desktop. I don’t think she’s a good candidate for Vista, so we’ll focus on XP. She was very adamant that the reason she still had Windows 2000 for so long was that “hackers don’t target Windows 2000 because it’s so old”… and that she had “conversations with Redmond” about continued official support of the aging OS. It was clear that she was firm in her beliefs, so I didn’t provide any rebuttal.

After applying enough band-aids and elbow grease, I decided that I’d call it quits for this visit. By the time I’d gotten halfway home, my BlackBerry started to buzz with messages from this client of various other maladies. I pictured her printing out a ream’s worth of error message screen shots. The feeling of regret was getting stronger, but she was nice enough to me despite her eccentricities. I’ll see this through; we all need to go through “character builders” from time to time to keep us honest, don’t we?

Fortunately, the other gig I had coming up would prove to be a cakewalk. It was with an old family friend that I’ve known for twenty some-odd years. The family was introducing a new Mac to the household, namely to relieve some pressure between the husband (an eBay maniac) and the wife (busy school board member) that came sharing an aging iBook. I had helped them purchase a refurbished MacBook from Apple, and the task at hand was to transfer everything from the iBook to the new MacBook. I love the migration utility built into OS X 10.4. It just works. It did all the heavy lifting for me, and I just tweaked a few things here and there, set up a new HP multifunction on their kids’ old iMac G4, then set up the husband with his own e-mail identity (believe it or not, they not only shared the old iBook, but a single e-mail address for several years). There was much rejoicing when I wrapped everything up. I’ll leave you to guess who got the old iBook and who got the new MacBook.

[tags]computer repair, computer advice[/tags]