Who Else Gets Hassled For Tech Support?

[tylrdiablos]

4 times in the past 4 weeks I've been interrupted whilst gaming/eating/sleeping because one of my friends has broken something on their computer.

I don't mind most of the time but I get the impression they're ALL getting a little lazy.

Today's phone call:
Me: Hello?
(different person from above)
Him: Can you come down (in the cold and rain!) and fix my laptop?
Me: What's wrong with it?
Him: MSN won't work.
Me: Do other webpages load?
Him: Oh yeah that reminds me, Google has gone off my thingy.
*face palm triggered by the word "thingy".*
Me: Can you access Google?
Him: Yeah.
Me: Ok then, go to Google and type in 'download MSN' and re-download it.
Him: Ok. *hangs up without another word*
He: Rude. =/

So he rings me back an hour later.

Him: MSN won't install.
Me: Any error messages?
Him: Yes.
Me: .... what did it say?
Him: I can't remember. So I put the Windows Restore disc in..
Me: Tsk *a bit louder than I intended to* The Windows Restore disc tends to cause more problems than it fixes.
(I leave out the "if not used properly" part.)

Long story short, I had to sit at his laptop (he wouldn't let me use it anywhere except for his living room) for 2 hours and attempt to fix his 400 errors.
Error 1603 could not be fixed via any method I found on Google and now I have to go back to my friends on Thursday.
(I'll probably just format the damn thing.)



Last week it was:
Me: Hello?
Him: Hey, my DVD's have picture but no sound.
Me: On your laptop or pc?
Him: My tv.
Me: Erm, I don't really know anything about tv's. Do the other channels or devices have sound?
Him: 1 sec, I'll look. *Background noises and muffled swearing*
Him: Nope nothing.
Me: I'll come down but I doubt I can help.

I venture down and as soon as I get within 5 yards of the tv I can see the problem.

Me: Give me the remote.
Him: *hands it over*
Me: Put your hand out, knuckles facing up.
Him: *does as asked*
I then proceeded to smack his knuckles with the remote and remove the earphones from the jack on the side of the tv. Resulting in the Animatrix menu music blasting out.


But my all-time favourite has to be when I let my Dad lend a DVD and he insisted it wouldn't play.
Him: It doesn't work.
Me: It works fine on my pc and xbox. Is the disc scratched?
Him: I don't know, come check.
I go over, hit the EJECT button and there's the problem.... the DVD is in UPSIDE DOWN! I flip it over and close the tray.
Me: Should be fine now.


Thanks to my "experiences" I now have a USB stick pre-loaded with installers for FireFox, CCleaner, various media players such as VLC and malware removers such as Spybot S&D.
That USB stick paid for itself after a week.


So, share your tech support stories and any handy programs (link to their sites) for entertainment.

[wyren]

I would never have believed that there were 2 peopl who could do the DVD problem. We had an officer convinced that the On Full Force position was only to be used in actual combat zone. He sent it in for repair because the radio would not work in the OFF position. We said we would need a statement of charges because he was not authorized to operate the radio in the OFF position. I still do not know what my seargent extorted from the poor guy but we tested the radio and sent it back. Ahhh the good times.

[waflob]

My favourite (and this is going back 15 years), was getting a call from a friend that his PC wouldn't boot any more. I asked what he had done. "Nothing" was the answer. Yeah, right ...

So, I go over to his place with a boot floppy and his PC is indeed hanging when it boots. Fortunately, it booted from the floppy and there was nothing strange in the config.sys or autoexec.bat. So I start manually entering the commands in the autoexec.bat until I find the culprit.

One of the commonly used 'tools' then was turbokey.com, which increased the repeat rate of the keyboard. There was about 2 bytes that actually did something and a load of text indicating various copyright blurb. When I mentioned that this was the culprit, he said "Oh yeah, I didn't like all that text, so I edited it - no harm in that, right?". You wingnut - it's a compiled program !!!

Another weird one (one for you unix geeks!) was when doing hotlinhe support in a previous company. I had a call from a guy telling me that when he tried to log out, the screen just went blank - not the expected login prompt. Upon further questioning, he changed his statement to "well, not completely blank, just a row if squiggles down the left hand side of the screen". Huh?? sounds like he's gotten himself in vi somehow. Let's see if this is true. "Hit escape and then type :q return" I tell him. That seemed to have done the trick and he exited happily and we ended the call. I was confused, didn't undertand what went wrong, and took the next call.

Any ideas?

About 3 hours later, I had a sudden revelation. When he logged out, instead of typing "exit", he must have accidentally hit the space bar after the "x" and entered instead the commend "ex it". ex is an older version of vi and he tried to use that to edit a new file called "it", Tadaa - case solved.

I have high hopes for some interesting posts in this thread :-)

DelBoy

[Erinion]

I've just had a laptop given to me that blue screened and the owner instantly reinstalled windows. Now she wants all her emails, photos, pdf's, databases and word docs back.

I recovered around 15 gig of data off the hard drive (using a sweet data recovery tool). I've also rebuilt outlooks pst file (another tool needed) and recovered 9000 emails + attachments. I've had to patch windows to reinstall office and load up anti virus and firewall software.

I think I've recovered around 75% of her missing files.

The blue screen was caused by over heating. Reinstalling windows didn't solve anything - it just gave me 3 days of work :(

The best part was that my PSU on MY desktop blew half way through the process - a 90mph drive to PCworld to pick up a 700 watt one was the most stressful part. Then I lost both my USB mem sticks so couldnt move anything back onto the laptop. Found them in a room in the house I havnt been in for weeks.

I'm still stressed.

[Clavina]

I stopped fixing friends PC's a long time ago after one of them gave a random stranger my number in a pub and said he could ring any time for computer help. I still do it for close family but I have them well trained in the do's and don'ts of Pc's. I also have clean images of their systems so if the worst comes to the worst I can just re-ghost them.

[waflob]

I stopped fixing friends PC's a long time ago after one of them gave a random stranger my number in a pub and said he could ring any time for computer help.
That's brutal - with friends like that, who needs enemies ...

Was this a problem, with calls at anti-social hours? If so, I'd have phoned your friend each and every time you got such a call.

DelBoy

[Glurin]

A friend of my roommate came to me and asked me to fix the printer. He said it was making funny noises and not printing properly. So I had a look at what was coming out and there was obviously a problem. Opened up the printer, no jams and the only debris that was obvious was a hair on one of the print heads.

Okay, maybe it just needs to go through a cleaning cycle. Then I happened to glance down and saw colored splotches on the carpet. When I asked, he said "Well, it was making noises, so I figured the cartridges were dirty. So I took them out and wiped them on the carpet a few times to clean them."

I found out later that the noises he was complaining about were the noises you hear during the normal operation of an inkjet printer.

[TPMdm]

"Wiped them on the carpet"???!!!! WTF? I lol'd irl

[FadeToBright]

I work as an IT Technician

So I get phone calls/IMs/Emails/etc. all day, everyday. :undecided:

[semiiramiis]

Woman I work with: "Um...Melissa...you know something about...computers and the internet, right?"
Me <warily>: "Some, but I'm pretty much just an end user, you know?"
<Blank look proves that no, she's unaware of that term....>
Her: "Er...no. I need to find a phone number for a pharmacy we don't have on the Rolodex. You think it might be on the internet somewhere...?"
(Hmmm..let me see... do I honestly think that I can find a Wal-Mart pharmacy number in Janesville, WI? Inquiring minds wish to know...)

Or my personal favorite... "Melissa! Melissa! They want me to F4! What does that mean? And...and... What is a hidden icon? How can I find it if it's HIDDEN!!!!"

[Peter]

I have no funny stories, because at this point, these stories cease to be funny and are now just painfully sad.