PC Retail

We had a call from a customer who had bought a PC from one of the big sheds, asking if we would come and set it up for him.

On arriving, the PC would not boot and the hard drive was making an ominous ticking sound; so we advised the customer to take it back from whence it came. The store declined to exchange it, and instead said their service department would send out the required part.

The next day a box arrived containing a new hard drive, a screwdriver, antistatic wrist strap and a book helpfully entitled Changing Your Hard Drive'. Needless to say, we got the job. So if the stores have now gone into (customer) DIY computer repairs, perhaps we can expect a lot more work like this?

We have done away with a few more Windows 98 machines this month, doing our bit to get these people up to speed with the latest systems. One customer first asked us to breathe some new life into his 10 year-old machine so he could get another year or two out of it.

Sadly for him (but not for us) his mainboard had gone. You do worry about some users' ability, or whether they should be allowed a PC at all, when you see a label on the front of the box saying 'press to start'.

Wireless networking can be a problem sometimes, normally owing to customer intervention, but this case was an extreme example.

A customer phoned saying that they had had several different firms round to set up their network for them, but it had never worked for very long. We decided to take up the challenge and went along. Setting up the router was no problem, we put in the security and tested one of their five laptops, showing it working.

At that point the lady of the house intervened and said she wanted to put in her own WPA key and didn't want anyone else to see it. Obligingly we went back into the router and let her type in her key, eyes averted in that way we all do when people are inputting passwords. She then went onto one of the laptops and exclaimed "there you are, it's not working!".

My colleague patiently explained the reason was that she had changed the security and she would now have to do the same on all the laptops for them to work. She was obviously having trouble typing in her key and was questioning why it wouldn't work. At this point my colleague felt a withdrawal without payment was called for before the situation got any worse. Sometimes there is no helping people...

Our office being sited on a University Campus has its advantages in terms of recruiting staff, which we can recommend to anyone in a similar location. Students Unions offer a recruitment service that is free to prospective employers, you just give them the details of any vacancy and they put it on their site and email it out to hundreds of students. It worked very well for us when we needed an office assistant.

We took on a medical student who is able to work two days a week, and he has progressed very well. Training to be a surgeon has distinct advantages and he has now progressed to building PCs for us, and reviving ailing systems seems to come as second nature! We are now recruiting a web designer in the same way.

There seems to be a plethora of spyware and malware at the moment. One laptop came in with a selection of pole dancers appearing above the system tray! Another lady was being extorted out of £80 to pay for an 'anti-spyware fix', which needless to say remained on her computer causing problems. Another customer was sent an invoice by a 'media company' asking for £40 to remove their software from his system after a free demo that he was unaware of had finished.

On the subject of spyware, we had a PC in one day where it was not possible to log onto any account even in safe mode. The customer had said the only thing he could remember doing before that was running a Spybot scan. We managed to get into the hard drive externally and do a repair, and then it worked fine.

The customer took it away and the very next day he was on the phone claiming that exactly the same thing had occurred again. Asking what he had done since he got it back, he replied: "Run a Spybot scan." We haven't known Spybot to cause this to happen before, but you think he might have learned a lesson?

For a bit of comic relief during any downtime, or whenever you need to take your mind of the daily grind, you might like to try a couple of computer related videos on YouTube. One is Medieval Helpdesk in English and the other Eddie Izzard's Encore on Computers – both strike a few humourous chords.