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What Was The Biggest Mistake You Made As a Computer Technician?
In the past, I have mentioned many of the mistakes I had made as a Computer Technician, mainly to show beginner technicians that it can happen to any of us and so they can avoid my mistakes.
The point of this article is to get some reader discussion going so we can all learn from eachother. So the question is:
What Was The Biggest Mistake You Made As a Computer Technician?
As always, comments are open and you dont need to sign up to post a comment. You can even post annoymously if you wish. Just click the comment link below this post.
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One of the first laptops I worked on had a flimsy plastic cover over the power button. That snapped in half when I tried to put it back on. Cost me $20 to replace it, but hurt my ego more than anything.
I was testing the hard drive in a laptop by swapping it out. When working on laptops…make sure you keep your screws in a clear, memorable order….
When reassembling with the old hard drive, I reinserted a screw that was about .2″ longer than the rest (used for the outside edge of the case) in the wrong part the case. Result? I put the screw through the motherboard. It *did* still POST but…I wouldn’t rely on that laptop.
I’d been a tech for about 5 years when that happened.
Windows 95 was just released. A residential customer with lots of money to burn on the wrong things demanded I install the Win95 package he purchased on his son’s 486 computer. The Win95 package was the diskette version, the ATI video card was not supported, the machine barely had enough memory to run Win 95. It took days to install and tweak, the customer was not happy with how slow the once “fast” system was with Win95, he decided to buy a Dell as replacement, Dell screwed up the order, sending him the wrong peripherals and multiples of speakers and displays. This guy was not happy.
As a courtesy to a valued client, I agreed to look at her elderly aunt’s computer. I diagnosed an impending failure on hard drive. I tried to save her some money and told her to take it back to CompUSA since it was still within the warranty. She said she had no car so I agreed to drop it off for her.
6 weeks later, I get a call from the elderly lady asking me what happened to the family biography she had been writing for the past year.
CompUSA did call her and explain that she would lose everything and that she needed to pay for a backup, she declined, they swapped the HD and rebuilt the OS and returned it to her.
Then her attorney son calls me, not CompUSA, and after endless complaining says “let me ask you something, are you incorporated?”. The next day, I filed to incorporate.
Chain restaurant business customer had problems connecting to ftp site required to process transactions. They were using a Win98 OS (this was mid 2004 and time for 98 to go). I told her I could probably fix the problem with an upgrade to XP. She agreed and I ran the update. It did fix the problm. Only thing is it did not save the files as it should have. I’d only been in business about 9 months and learned the hard way to disk copy everything on a business hard drive and NEVER depend on the customer to tell you what is important. I now copy nearly everyting on each rebuild even though the customers sign a release saying that it is their responsibility to tell me what needs to be saved. Being right doesn’t win customers. Thinking ahead and sometimes thinking for them does!
A business brought in their computer to have us reinstall it and when it was done they wanted us to setup their dial-up. The customer’s last name was nearly the same as another in our database and I ended up setting his dial-up location to a town about 30 miles away, because that’s where the other customer lived. The customer never checked the number he was dialing when he got the computer back. After a month he called us, demanding that we pay his $800 phone bill that resulted from dialing the access number 30 miles away which ended up being long distance.
Now we have another line of fine print on our receipts and we always tell the customer to check it when they get home.
I really just do this on the side as I currently work for a decent sized company in thier IT department. For things done here well letting the user ok the deletion of his files that had no backup. The stuff I do on the side nothing really so far except letting some of my co-workers get away with free work. It isn’t too bad when I do it during my normal working hours. But I did take some home and not get paid worst was a HDD recovery in which the virus scan took 2+ days. I didn’t really discuss payment before hand so I can’t ask for it at the end. But yeah I won’t let too many people get free work out of me and I don’t mind small jobs I can do while I am at work. I need to make it understood that I do charge to my co-workers. The upside to the HDD recovery was I got to keep the old HDD.
The biggest mistake I’ve made? Probably letting myself get angry at a customer on the phone. Luckily, my business partner was around so I could hand the call off to him, but if he hadn’t walked in when he did, I shudder to think!
Cuke: How did you manage to set it up for long-distance dialling *by accident*? It shouldn’t be possible to dial long-distance without deliberately putting in the number with the LDD prefix.
I’ve been pretty careful about things, so I don’t have any *huge* screwups of my own to relate. I’ve got the usual assortment of “Damn, it would have been easier if I had just X to begin with” stories, though, including one time where I literally spent *weeks* fighting with a tape drive attached to a Fedora Core 3 machine, as the bloody thing would crash the entire system hard as soon as the dump got larger than about 60GB.
I spent *weeks* replacing the drive and the SCSI card and the software and running tests, completely stumped by what was causing the crashes. Eventually the crashes started happening when the tape drive wasn’t running, and then when the tape drive wasn’t installed, and those were my first solid confirmation that the tape drive wasn’t the problem.
The final problem? I have no idea. I still don’t know what the source of the problem was.
What I did is segregated one-half of the RAID (to provide me with a backup copy of everything) and wiped the other half flat, installing a different OS on bare metal, and setting *it* up to duplicate the old server’s functionality.
A month later, once I was certain my problems were solved and I wouldn’t have to revert back to the previous FC3 installation, I wiped the second drive and reconverted it back into a RAID.
(Extra dumbness: Were I doing it again, I would definitely do the RAID setup on the new OS differently. I’d set up the new OS with a “standard” disk, when I really should have set it up with a software RAID immediately, and simply left it in “degraded” mode until I was ready to add the second disk back in. Putting the RAID back, the way I did it, meant: Setting up the second disk as “degraded RAID”. Copying everything from first disk to second. Booting from second. Wiping first, adding it to the RAID.)
Basically, everything worked in the end, but it took me much, much, much longer than it should have.
JohnR: It was in the same area code, but still long distance. perhaps it’s just a Central New York thing, but it’s possible here to just dial the 7 digit number and it still be long distance.
I’m not a computer technician….and my first experience upgrading some RAM demonstrates why…schoolboy error, open case whilst plugged in, no earthing….
You know the rest (:
Oh man,
Probably not fully etching a definite line between friends and business. Too many times I’ve dumped hours of time into ‘helping’ people with their technical situations and not charging. Sometimes people think because you can fix an error or address a situation within a few minutes that it should not be compensated. But in all reality the countless hours you have dumped into learning/memorizing those skills… is just that, a ‘trade’ skill.
How often does a ‘friend’ come over to your house and do all your laundry free of charge. Or drives across town to wash your windows?
After thinking about it that way… I definitely draw a line now.
A mistake it appears I repeat once on a while is to give advice or do some free work for friends. But also burned a HDD in a Compaq laptop.
In this particular old model the HDD had a ribbon connector including the power lines leaving the connection lines exposed. I did not secured the ribbon as well as I thought I had and it burned after a couple of hours of work.
RoboMonkey, I like your analogy.
I too have had trouble differentiating between “friends and business” customers. Your analogy certainly will make it easier for me in the future.
On the technical side of mistakes I’ve made, the worst was getting distracted while troubleshooting a RAM issue and swapping a stick while powered up. It was on one of my own machines so there were no unhappy customers, but my ego did take a self imposed bruising.
“Friends and Business”, yup. My step-mother is elderly, and lately seems EVERY TIME that I go visit her and my father, she has a problem. I’ve told her several times before, whatever the error is, WRITE IT DOWN EXACTLY so that I know what I’m looking for.
What’s the problem this time? She says the computer comes up saying it “doesn’t have enough power to do something.” Do what? What were you doing when it happened? Did you write down the error? Jeesh…
Got frustrated enough that I’ve now dragged the machine back home. It’s gonna sit here for about a week before I look at it; perhaps she’ll learn to write down the error next time. Have no clue what she’s talking about; suspecting a dying hard drive, but don’t know.
The biggest issue I have with users is that if ANY LITTLE THING happens that is different than what normally occurs with their machine, they panic. Like if a different icon appears on their desktop. Man, do folks get touchy about their icons.
Sorry, I’m digressing from the original thread.
Back again, this post got me thinking… about some other boo boo’s.
Booting up an early AMD Athlon processor (ya know… the one with the die exposed in early 2000’s.) While it didn’t post for some odd reason, I thought I had turned off the power and slipped off the heatsink to take a peek at something and not realizing the power was still running and suddenly.
*POOF*
A cloud of smoke floated up in the freaking air. Representing the $179 I had just spent in that lovely scent of burning silicon. While the processor literally cooked before my eyes within 3 seconds!
That’s when I experienced the Zen Buddhism moment of, “one hand clapping” continuously by smacking myself in the forehead with my available hand while chanting, “Bonehead!” like a mantra.
Well I’m not a techie exactly…cause I don’t really do it for a living…an enthusiast-cum-free jobs for pretty ladies guy (or just ladies…actually anyone)would be better!
I was into a Linux Crash Course and of the sheer excitement of installing Linux (Suse 10.x to be more precise)…I made a dual-boot out of my desktop…initially running XP Pro. The Linux boot loader (Grub i guess) would do its job until I realized that this more green flavored Linux was not exactly my meal due to hardware issues and stuff…it was when the pentium d’s had just arrived! So gone was Linux and along went the boot loader…in the panic that followed ended with a fresh install of XP…with the loss of about 40 gigs of data!
Now I hope everyone knows what data loss means!
The worst experience ive ever had ivolved the deltree command and thats all im going to say!!!!
I wanted to help a friend with his virus problem. He had all of his photos, music and Divx files but had no backup. Amount of space: 22 Gb. My 17 years as technician told me to do the quickest system: From his Hdd to my Hdd. I made a quick test to be sure I got all of the files. I removed my Hd slowly and carefully, then I did a HD format and a New-Clean Xp. When I tried to put back those 22 Gb, my hdd was hardly broken. Still can’t believe it!!. Too much self believing and optimistic work. I’ve lost some years of photos, and …
biggest mistake – Doing free work for hot chicks. Don’t lie, we’ve all done it.
This one time.. I was being rushed and was my nerves were wearing thin when I got careless with $ rm -rf
This is kinda OT. I’ve been seeing alot of residential OE users save every message they ever received, and can’t understand why OE tanks when it gets up close to 4,000 messages in it’s db. They use it for archiving rather than the send/receive/delete message process. When I tell them the message file is corrupt and all is lost they cry in their beer over the messages lost from dear departed Aunt Gertrude or their e-mailed porn collection.
When first learning DOS, I came across the fdisk.com file. Hmmm, let me see what it does. ‘Delete partition?’, what’s a partition I thought? Sure why not, let’s delete it. We all know what happens to a drive with no partition. Wow, I learned what that does the next minute.
I didn’t do this myself, but I once got a computer fixed and the disk drive was put back in very crooked. It was visually noticeable that it wasn’t positioned correctly! Something so simple!
1. Starting work on a machine while the customer is there. I now tell them I should have it on the table shortly and will give them a call as soon as I have finished doing whatever.
2. Not discussing money. If it is a “friend” I have an associate call to confirm the cost of repair if it hasn’t been cleared up first.
3. Plugging in a hard drive the wrong way. I had an external usb ide cable and the power connector was cheap rubbery plastic. I plugged it in the wrong way. Cost me a new hard drive, a lost night sleep, and a full computer rebuild. Plus, I felt like an idiot.
I double check now and threw away the cheap power supply.
In my younger and no fear (and no sense) days, I decided to change the volatge switch on the back of the psu and then watched as the psu burned out in a massive cloud of smoke!!
Burning a cpu in seconds because I forgot to put the heatsink and fan on.
Electrocuting myself off a power supply once!!
Thank fully I am very cautious nowadays and more experienced!
I sometimes mess up and quote somebody a set price without seeing a system, and then discover I’m going to work something like 50 hours for 50 bucks. UGH. Stoopid-head :-(
I’m the guy who gets all the calls although I’m not that technical. Last week I ordered a hard drive for a friend and it was the wrong kind. More of a look stupid that a major problem but its on the way back to the shop now.
Has anyone left any tools in a machine before or is that just me?
I’ve been told (Girlfriend) to help my father-in-law (almost) with his machine, does anyone else get this?
It always crashes, on inspection he has about 3 anti-virus software running at the same time, god knows how how much bloatware running at the start-up from installed then removed (unsuccessfully) programs
It’s a fairly decent machine, not too old
The point is he doesn’t want my help to fix it as he’s ‘read’ some things about computers and thinks he knows best
In answer to the question though the biggest mistake is trying help someone who thinks that they know best and won’t let you on the damn machine to fix it
New Power Supply wouldn’t fit in the case because the on/off switch. I opened the psu case, took out the toggle switch and twisted the wires together. Plugged it in while still holding the bare twisted wires….Didn’t hurt, but def. embarrasing.
How about setting up a business customer with a new machine, including the transfer from old to new. After deleting the user on the old machine, to set it up for someone new, I realized that the customer’s email had been completely wiped. Luckily, the guy was laid-back about it. Had it been me, personally, I may have considered suicide.
Not charging enough was my biggest mistake in the beginning. Just too much of a softy.
Hello! The biggest mistake I did was reinstalling Windows XP because I wasn’t able to order the icons in “Arbeitsplatz” (“My Computer”) as they were positioned after a fresk installation.
I have done so many stupid things but maybe the stupidest was trying to fit a customer’s laptop hard drive back into its case adapter without my specs on. I was holding the bit that goes onto those delicate pins back to front and when it wouldn’t fit I tried again and again till I lost my temper and rammed it on hard, snapping 2 of the pins off. It was only when I went to fetch my glasses that I realised the full horror of the situation.
Oh yeah, and pointing at something on a customer’s laptop on site and breaking the screen. Everyone just stood there motionless for a good 30 seconds.
hi im only 16 years old. I have many questions. what school would should i go to to become a mac technician because i was planning to go to school for about 5 to 6 years please reply!
Several years ago I was given a bigger HD to replace my original HD as it was makeing loud bearing noises.
Copied the windows 95 over and all the directories and files. Tested the new HD, everything was working OK, after a couple of hours I decided to reformat the original HD.
Reformat went like clockwork, feeling good I stepped back from the PC, the screen went blank.
Ohooooo I says, I attempted a reboot, nothing, tried again, still nothing, put a bootable floppy in the A: drive and reboot, attempt a C:\ and dir, nothing.
Seems the “new” HD decided to fail while I was reformatting my old HD, result, I lost the lot.
Everything on my original HD and the PC lost everything on my “new” HD at the same time.
Ha Ha just gotta laugh.
My client put an icon in his desktop which is somewhat similar to recycle bin. and named it bicycle bin, all his important files was in that folder. When i tried removing all the files in the recycle bin i was wondering why two recycle bins? so the next thing was history… i erased all his files inside the bicycle bin also with the client sitting beside me. i was not able to back up all his important files because it was saved on the desktop. He end up encoding his files from the beginning. peace….
ooooohhh, I’ve had some doozies in my day.
I like to write scripts to automate stuff. In my early days of scripting at my current job, me and a co-worker wrote a script to remove a certain client software from all machines. It also would remove things from a folder on the c drive, and remove the folder under certain conditions. Only problem was, my logic for determining those conditions was reversed. So folders got deleted from quite a few machines that contained very important files.
Another one, very simple mistake to make. I needed to re-image an important user’s computer. Did I back up their data before re-imaging the disk? Nope.
Most recently, a freind needed a memory upgrade for computers at his business. I gave him what I thought were the right chips. He put them in, but being inexperienced in the ways of hardware work, he powered on the computer even though the chips didn’t fit in the slots correctly. POOF! bye bye motherboard. And of course this happened the morning I was leaving for vacation so I couldn’t help him fix the issue.
@Phil Benwell:
I have worked on many car engines in my day as well. I never left a tool in a computer, but I have left a screwdriver under an intake manifold in a small block ChevY!
1. When I was a little greener I powered on a ps a few times without a load on it unknowingly messing up the ps, so when I fired up the pc it locked up during post and in the bios. Adding insult to injury I tried to flash the bios, it locked up and crashed, by-by motherboard and ps.
2. Once took a cpu out of a machine to test on a patient, no problem right, except I forgot that my machine had been running for… well forever (i never turn off my machines). So when I took the heat sink off it burned my hand and crashed into my amd that had the die exposed. by-by cpu.
3. Used to do a lot of unattented xp installs. so I would constantly rebuilding them with new updates or programs. One night I left a freshly built disc in my drive, needless to say I awoke to a fresh install. Thanks automatic windows update with a restart.
> 3. Used to do a lot of unattented xp installs. so I would constantly rebuilding them with new updates or programs. One night I left a freshly built disc in my drive, needless to say I awoke to a fresh install. Thanks automatic windows update with a restart.
Nice one. :) I hate those automatic restarts.
I remember some big mistakes.
Almost 20 years ago I had my first PC and was learning DOS. I was around 16 years old. One day my father took me to his work. I would only say its a very big factory around here. I found those big IBMs they had around there and started playing with them. I wanted to format a 10″ floppy (never seen them again in any other place) and formatted the hard drive. Breaking things is the better way to learn.
Some years later my Christmas present was a hard drive for my PC. Originally it only had two 5¼ floppy drives. It had an amazing 20Mb capacity. Yes, Mb. After some time I needed more space (as with any hard drive) and I tried that new program to compress data on the disk. I think it was called doubledisk. When I rebooted c: was a 40Mb drive as promised but I was surprised to find I had a new drive (d:) with a size of 20Mb and a 20Mb file in it. I thought that if I deleted that file I would have 60Mb in total, wow!. I learnt the hard way that my new c: drive was a virtual drive and all its data was compressed in a file in the real drive (d:). I lost it all. Thanks it was my own PC.
Last one.
This happened just some months ago. I was sent to an office where one of the machines wouldn’t boot. BIOS post was ok but Windows didn’t load. Just a black screen with no error messages. UBCD loaded correctly and seemed all info was on the HD. I supposed it was an HD problem with the boot sector, logical or physical so I tried fdisk /mbr, full scandisk, repair windows installation (XP installation CD booted ok), etc. No surface errors appeared and nothing solved the problem.
Finally I imaged the drive, formatted and reinstalled XP. In the middle of the XP installation there comes this moment where the machine restarts and boots for the first time from the HD and not from the installation CD. Again I got the black screen. I was desperate thinking what to do next when I saw the floppy disk drive for the first time. I pressed the ejection button and there it was, a floppy was inserted in the drive. I had completely forgotten this things existed. Maybe it was formatted with /s but didn’t had the files so it tried to boot the OS but failed and didn’t show any message. Without the disk in the drive the PC booted perfectly, of course. A stupid floppy in the drive cost me 4 hours of work and a formatted XP for the customer.
I only told this to one of my colleagues and he is still laughing at me. Now I laugh too.
Greatest mistake…
My freatest mistake has been installing free software for clients. Especially antivirus and antispyware products. The reason I consider this a mistake is: 1) I make no profit for it and I’m expected to support it. 2) If the product fails to meet expectations, I get blamed for installing it and recommending it. 3) Because of these 2 things, I loose time and money!
I will only recommed “free software” if I know a client will not use anything else. It may be better than nothing for my client. I usually refuse to set it up /install it, because I do not want phone calls for free tech support. Obviously, if its a good client, I respond, but I quickly recommend another answer to the problem.
I came to this realization after a 2 hour phone call to resolve a Yahoo and AVG issue, on my cell phone from a good client. After all, tech support from these companies is almost non-existent, so my clients expect me to have all the answers.
I’m a nice guy and my company offers excellent customer service. My clients call 24/7/365, yes, I got 2 calls Christmas day. Therefore for my time, I use products that I can sell at a profit to offset my time.
Sometimes I need to remind myself that my company is a “For profit corporation.”
Steve
Steve…
You’ve made no mistake…
Care for people, and you’re screwed.
Don’t care for people, and you’re doubly screwed.
There is no happy answer.
All you can do is ensure (not “insure”) that you feel good about yourself. The rest will take care of itself.
Cheers, PiffleMaster…
When I was first starting in computer repair, I got the bright idea to stick a screw driver in a PS fan to stop it. Had to test where the noise was coming from. About a *POP* *SIZZLE* *SMOKE* later I realized I should have used a shorter screwdriver.
About 3 years ago I was fresh out of school working for Circuit City. I had bookoos of MS XP install disks that I attained while I was in college. Anyway, this woman called the tech desk at circuit city saying that you had to have XP Pro installed in order to use their network (at her college). NOT XP Media Center. She said she just purchased the PC DAYS ago and needed it to work. So I quoted what XP Pro cost and the install fee and so forth. She said she couldn’t afford it and sounded like she was about to start crying. Me being Mr Nice guy, with the pirated software gave her my personal Cell Phone number and we scheduled an appointment.
I WIPED EVERYTHING… No DriverMAX … Nothing…
So after I destroyed the restore partician and loaded Fake XP her computer was indicating a host had unrecognized hardware, and NONE of the codecs worked. It was the big HP Media Center. SHE was pissed. I was only going to charge her 40 bucks. When I couldn’t get any of the things she needed to work, despite my efforts, I conceded, and sub contracted the work to a pro. He was sympathetic and only charged me $160 for the job, because back when he was brand new he made a similar mistake. I learned so many lessons from that. The biggest thing I learned is . NEVER EVER use pirated Windows. I have made it a concrete rule to never use pirated ANYTHING for my new business. No matter how much you think it will save a customer money, it can always bite you and put you in a alligator death roll, plus its unethical AND ILLEGAL. If I had that Job to do today, I could make it work without a hitch, but I wouldn’t do it.
Mr Obvious says to always turn the power off when moving a pc by by hard drive. I learned a hard lesson with that one.
On a Sharp laptop years ago, plugged the hard drive into the socket a couple pins too far to one side, shorted the power pins burned some trace on the motherboard because it was dead after that and the laptop was worthless.
Back when FAT32 was new, I used the Microsoft FAT32 converter that came with Windows to convert a customers drive from FAT to FAT32.
For whatever reason, the process did not go well, and it ended up destroying the file system. I then had to perform file recovery to get back the customers important data and reinstall the OS.
I never used the Microsoft converter again, instead now relying on third party utilities.
hey techs
new kid on the block I think
i’m ready to venture out
just been working on friends
and family pc’s no strangers
yet ready to make this career
change been in the autobody and
painting business for 25 years
and had a auto detail business
for 10 years so I know what it’s
like when dealing with customers
advice would be helpful.
Our HTPC in my parents’ living room was making a loud clicking noise that was unbearably annoying and me and my dad both assumed it was a failing hard drive. Later that day, we went to the store, bought a new 1TB drive, Norton Ghost. Duplicated the drive over to the new one, took the old one out and with satisfaction I hit the ON button…
*click click click* o_O
Turns out it was a broken fan.
I was beyond upset because of the time and money wasted, but on the bright side, our HTPC now has an extra TB of space :D
When I was 14 or 15, I wanted to copy some files from my Dad’s 486 to my older 486… This was with Windows ’95. I installed my 400 MB hard disk as slave and his 1GB hard drive (Woo!) as master on *his* computer. booted it up into DOS mode, was in a hurry, so I decided to erase my drive with the format /q command.. or so I thought. In *my* computer, as the channel master, my hard disk was C: .. In his, as channel slave, my hard disk was D: , and C: was… his lovely brand-new 1GB drive. So I typed in “format c: /q” >computer asks: “This will DESTROY all data on the hard disk” and I’m used to doing this, so I hit “yes, yes, enter, enter…” and it starts and just as it starts, I remember that my drive is D: on this machine. I the literally 1-2 seconds it took to wipe the drive, I must have hit Escape five times and CTRL – C and CTRL – Break at least twice each, but it didn’t stop of course… The good thing was, I had floppy backups of his documents and the original CDs, so I was able to get his data back. It took all day to install all of his stuff though. And only a few years later I learned about the FAT-16 UNFORMAT utility designed to undo quick formats. ah, well… lesson learned, always think twice about your system configuration when doing something drastic.
The first couple of months I was out on my own in the computer repair industry (9 years ago), my ex-boss asked me to install a faster processor into his system. No problem, right? Well, I didn’t know you needed to apply thermal paste (grease) between the processor and the heatsink. I fried the processor and motherboard. My ex-boss took it in stride, but I still feel bad about it to this day.
hi all
i have been pottering with pc’s bout 7 yrs and a few months ago a friend of my g/f who works in a school told my g/f that if i was interested in a pc for spare parts as they have 1 at the school that is going to be thrown out, as the county technition has now released it for disposal.
however upon opening the pc as it wouldnt boot up i noticed that the cable was not attatched to the HDD plus the HDD cable has what looked like a porpouse made hole cut into it, and all the pins on the HDD were bent which i carefully straightend with a small metal footbal pump adapter i replaced the cable expecting the HDD to have been formated, however it booted up with no problems to which is in constant use, the pc is a DELL Dimension XPS T700r
I remember getting a call from a friend saying that his desktop had changed which had a “virus your computer has been infected bla blah wallpaper” that would never switched back to the windows xp one or others thems.
So i Run several antivirus and malware tools thinking that it might possibly fix it.Yet still no changes.even smitfraudix didnt changed it.
To get rid of it for once and for all…FORMAT was the only solution left.Backup everything on another partition…fresh copy of windows and installed drivers and applications and network connectivity.
All neat.
Was not really a mistake for me until i found on that there was a quicker solution to fix that problem on a blog 1 week after that when i was browing the net that on what that “desktop virus” problem was to be supposedly.
Its the thing you find in display properties>customise desktop>add web page to desktop and you just had to delete it!.
LOL i laughed/so yes i guess i spent a lot of time in front of his pc re-installing everything..instead i could have done that but i didnt know about this solution when on the site.Well it also made me confident because i gave my best re-installing everything os drivers and apps and network and left no mistake doing it ang got the pc fresh and running and also go that my friend thanked me for.
i’ve learnt from that that format isnt the only option and also i was young and still learning in my it essentials course and it was my third or fourth computer repair task.So yes i guess its a mistake that i’ve learnt from
Going to school for PC technician instead of fiber optic cabling, or something else.
If I did cabling I would working now making big bucks as I live in Southern California and that will always be in demand. The PC industry is flooded and a poor career choice IMO. To the guy who did autobody 25 years I hope you have everything you want already because to switch that for PC tech is a bad move I think.
You may think I’m a nay-saying but I’m just being honest. As far as PC knowledge I know tons and even do some programming so its not that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Anyway that’s my biggest mistake.
as a hobby I love computer stuff and projects but as a living, the same amount of study would give me 10x pay in any other area than PC Tech.
Not really had many but i bought a fairly nice motherboard off ebay for my then new build. I bought a cheap celeron to test it, didn’t wanna use my current core 2 duo E8600 coz i didn’t wanna blow a £200 cpu. Anyway, put the system together, and system would just keep restarting 30 seconds into the startup. Rubbish i thought, and blamed the second hand motherboard. So got rid, bought a cheap Gigabyte mobo and tried again. Same thing. As it was the first time i’d ever used LGA-775 socket mobo’s and cpu’s, turns out i hadn’t fastened the heatsink and fand screws onto the mobo properly!! Doh!!
One of my superiors was working on the company server because it ha problems.I walked in an asked “have you tried rebooting it”.He stared at me and I was embarrased.
Someone here said something about dual booting w/ linux and windows and the grub loader. He said he removed linux and had to reinstall windows because of the grub loader. That’s UNNECESSARY. Go to the recovery console using the windows disk and recreate the boot sector, Done! It’s not that hard. I used dual-booting when I was in college because I was taking a computer science course on linux. When the class was done, I removed linux and recreated the boot sector and everything worked fine.
However one of the stupidest things I’ve done:
I was trying to be nice and make a friend out of it. I heard someone needed some computer and I offered to look at it for free, not a big deal. Big mistake. Not even the power button worked that well anymore. The computer had been shut off incorrectly for far to long. Instead of doing the obvious like checking the hard drive w/ a simple diagnostic tool you can find off the hard drive manufacturer’s website or through Hiren’s disk, I used chkdsk. It took several hours and never completed and instead eventually rebooted. I guess either windows was too corrupted for it to work w/ chkdsk or the hard drive was bad. But I spent the whole day waiting on chkdsk I never did the quicker method of just running hard drive diagnostic. Not a big deal, said I would do it for free. But it made me look bad because I spent several hours and never fixed even though I said I was a computer expert. The friendship never materialized either because I found out that we would only communicate when there was a computer problem.
Quick hard drive diagnostic because if the hard drive is really bad (which it will usually be if you spend months shutting it off my removing the power cord) a quick diagnostic will usually show it’s bad and you never have to perform the long full hard drive diagnostic.
Here’s you a good one you may get a kick out of, I repaired a pc for my sons friend and he had no money to pay for the repair despite having a job at foodlion, so after fixing the pc, he said he was going to bring me some chedder and pepperjack cheese from where he worked as payment, well I got the chedder chesse but never did get any pepperjack. True story
I work for an ISP and computer repair shop. We also do web and email hosting. My first week or so on the job I was looking into some email errors for a customer and was digging through their account settings. I wound up clicking on the wrong thing and deleted every single email that the customer had saved. It was a local business that has been operating since the ’50s. They weren’t too happy lol.
As an Administrator of a company Ltd. You are assigned to assist workers and non-experienced sub-administrators to have a proper requirement tools to configure computers in the company. You are require to
1. Items to Repair a computer (solution)
2. Proper way of Repairs (tools)
3. To configure 100 pcs (technique).
please send me answers via my e-mail address
thanks for your concern.
I have learned a hard lesson,never do anything for FREE even for your friends. I am not God, they expect me to know everything about computers and if I couldn’t solve it, then they make fun “this fellow is good for nothing”.
Tips:
1. Scare them before you touch the laptop or desktop Ex: you need to replace HD
2. Try not to do any work in front of them
3. Tell them it took hours to fix the problem
-Thanks
Boy oh boy oh boy… do I have a lot of stories to tell!
Bit of background – I’ve always been a geek, I’ve worked in an independent sales/repair shop for 2 and a half years as a Saturday job (I’m nearly 18, still at sixth form (college for guys in the USA)), and I naturally do a lot of friends and family work.
So, one of my first stories:
Customer comes in to the shop, says they have a problem with one of their PCs, something like it won’t start up properly (something hardware-related, I don’t recall what exactly). So I take it into the back, just round the corner out of sight. My old manager and new manager were both there (the old had sold the shop’s franchise to the new one, and the old was the main franchiser). I also had a colleague next to me with many years experience with computers.
Ensue a long silence when I plug in the power cable, puff goes the slimline PSU unit, and shorts the whole thing out. I sort of just stood there for a minute, went bright red, then remember who else was in the back with me. Not the best first impression to make on your new boss…
Lesson: always make sure that the power switch is in the OFF position before you attach it to a PC.
Another story (not a mistake this time), customer comes back to the shop a few hours after buying a wireless dongle for his daughter’s laptop, who’s wireless chip had gone (it had become fractured due to ‘carelessness’, shall we say). So, he comes in, says that this top of the range dongle, which was solidly built, had “snapped”, leaving the USB connector stuck in a USB port, and the remaining stick just there, not able to do anything (naturally). He wants a refund because of a faulty product. I try my best to explain that things like this can’t be refunded since it isn’t a fault with the product, he starts shouting at me (cue manager to wander out from the back), my manager then explains the same thing that I did, the customer gets really aggressive, and actually throws the dongle stick at us, catching me on the head. He then storms out, nearly breaking the door. Now, probably not the normal response, but me and my manager just looked at each other, laughed for a minute, then calmly resumed work. I’m happy to also report that this is the only case of verbal/physical abuse so far :-)
Lesson: well, none really. Just be good at ducking!
I was at a friend of a friend’s house, they were having intermittent problems with their internet. So, I go around, find they have a laptop (on wireless), and a wireless router that’s plugged into an extension socket (i.e. not the master one). So I do the standard things like check the drivers of the wireless card, do some updates, check the settings on the router, etc etc. I then thought it could be the socket itself, cue me getting out my screwdriver and taking the front off of the socket. Lo and behold it’s the style that doesn’t have a test socket, so I then looked the fool for putting the fascia straight back on without really doing anything.
Scratched my head a bit more, still couldn’t work anything out, so I ran a few more diagnostics on the router, and noticed there was a load of noise on the line, so I advised them to get BT out to check the line and do their other tests (I’m not that good on Internet line issues and networking, just the ‘consumer’ end of things – it’s something I’m working on). Anyway, BT engineer comes and can’t find any faults with anything.
Next day, it’s working with a faster speed and no drop in connection. Bit coincidental I think.
Wasted a lot of time with that…
Lesson: remember it’s not always the client or their equipment…
A colleague of mine copied a client’s data from our workshop machine to their new hard drive, and also to another client’s machine by accident. Didn’t realise till the second one rang us up saying that they didn’t recognise the people in the photographs. Was quickly resolved, and the customer was understanding too. It was an honest mistake and they knew it. We apologised, but nothing was lost, and they both received the full service in the end anyway.
I’ve made many more ‘normal’ mistakes too, such as installing XP Home instead of Pro (and vice versa).
Anyway, that’s enough from me. I’m loving this site by the way, so glad I found that offline update CD – will save me SO much time in the future!!!
James
My worst experience ever:
In 2008 I had a neighborhood customer back in my hometown that called me while on break from college. She told me that her printer wasn’t printing over the network, so I figured it was probably a simple firewall issue or wrong setting. I arrive confidently looking over the settings, but not seeing much wrong. Drivers were fine so I proceeded to run a spyware scan. Some of the spyware needed a restart to be erased so I restarted the computer. When the computer powered back on, I got a blue screen of death. This usually is not a huge problem right? Wrong! The client had not restarted their computer in over a year, with windows XP. The hundreds of viruses/spyware were accumulating and corrupting her system files. It was so bad I could not load boot disks, windows reinstall disks, and to top it off their laptop was using windows vista and wasn’t compatible with their printer. So their daughter had no way to print her report due the next day and I was on a very tight time schedule to get back to school. Her entire family came into the room, surrounding me with chairs and failing to understand that I didn’t break their computer, proceeded to give me angry stares while I told them to take it to Staples. Most awful experience I can think of, destroyed my ego and reputation in that neighborhood.
Advice:
1) NEVER underestimate a job.
2) Get the client to restart their computer prior to working on it.