Unfortunately most people will just use you and take for granted your efforts
on their part. And if they think it is beyond you will willingly pay some grunge
shop mega-bucks to fix their machine. I don't ask for money when I fix friends
machines but at least they should show some gratitude for the money you
saved them.
A neighbor recently brought me a laptop that his son had tried to install XP
on with a friends cd. Since MSh-t has in its wisdom instituted call-in initiation
as part of it's anti-piracy measures with great chest-thumping, the installation
froze leaving only an inaccessable NTFS partition. And of course all drivers
were lost. After doing some searching on XP which I have never used I found
delpart and zapped the drive and then set it up again using fdisk and
formatted it. I then had to find all the drivers and reinstall w98se as well as
some essential programs. It took me about 2 days work.
When I phoned them to say it was functioning again and to pick it up so I
could show them some important things, the reply was "Oh I can't now" and
I am still waiting for them. No "Thank you", no "Sorry I'll pick it up as soon as
I"m free". This is the 2nd time I reinstalled W98 for them as well as helping
them overcome other problems. And always with a taking for granted attitude.
Newby's seem to think it's like repairing a flat on a bicycle.
No more free tech for these guys. The next time they'll pay $ or they can
take thier problems to a shop and pay the going rate.
Lawrence
> > Oh. Well, yeah. They're mostly the same folk. As contradictory as
> >that sounds, it is really the truth.
>
> Amazing how that is huh. They'll give you all the real junk, but toss the
> stuff that is of interest.
>
> >Let me guess. "But I thought you only like OLD Macs?"
>
> No, it was more along the lines of "Well, it never worked right for me
> anyway". My retort was simply "Yeah, but you're a moron" (I've known his
> brother since I was in the 3rd grade... so I can get away with calling
> him a moron and not fear that he will stiff me when he junks the iMac G4
> in a month when he craps it up too.)
>
>
> And to add insult to my weekend... I just got back from my sister's house
> (had to fix her PC, her kids shoved the power button clean out of the
> front of the case). It seems her husband did the same thing to me. They
> got a new PC, and she planned to turn the old one into a kids gaming
> computer. But her husband decided it was taking up space and gave it to
> some guy he knows from work last month. At least I don't mind half as
> much with this one, it was only a P180 Compaq, this little black, non
> expandable desktop unit. And it went to another user rather than the
> trash. No serious loss. (although it would have made a nice tiny netBSD
> server since the thing was little bigger than a VCR)
>
> -chris
> <http://www.mythtech.net>
>
lgwalker_at_mts.net
bigwalk_ca_at_yahoo.com
Received on Sun Sep 01 2002 - 20:55:39 BST