Re: tech help, sanity and in laws

Having people pay willingly and generously for repetitive work goes a long way
toward preserving my sanity. The most difficult ones to deal with are always
family, and my wife and youngest son are pretty literate computerwise. My
oldest son is making progress.

I have spent a lot of time training some of my most motivated clients how to
back up their critical data, and even set up backup scripts to burn CDs or to
back up onto an external hard drive. It's the less motivated ones who are the
problem. The solution is probably pencil, paper and an abacus, except you
would have to do abacus training... Ben

On Wed, 16 May 2007 10:30:41 -0500, RnR <rnrtexas@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

How do you guys keep your sanity when you have to fix other's pc's
after you already did it before and they can't tell what they did to
mess it up again? I fixed my sister in law's pc about 6 months or so
ago (lot of viri) which I probably spent about a day or so (for free)
getting it cleaned up only to find it messed up again last nite (this
time probably not viri).

To make a short story, she has a dell 2400 and lost an excel file and
asked if I could find it; looks like she wrote over it and it wasn't
in the recycle bin. But the problem is everything I wanted to try,
took so long I lost my patience and I couldn't stay that long to fix
it. Even my thumb drive which was recognized wouldn't open (or so it
seemed after a couple of minutes). I managed to clean the registry
and a few other things but really didn't help much. I finally
suggested it was probably best to wipe the disk and reinstall the OS
(xp home) because I told her for me to fix it would take too long. I
suggested I'd partition her drive so she could move her important
stuff on that partition and then I could do the OS reinstall. I know
she doesn't understand me fully but that's another story. And don't
ask about a backup.... I doubt she would even know what it is <g>
(next time I fix it, I'll make a backup).

I know I need more patience because my wife gets mad at me when I get
mad at her computer illiteracy. I guess I expect people by now to
know more about pc's (at least basics) but that's not the case. All
they seem to want to know is how to use the keyboard :( . Geeze..
(maybe I'm hanging out in here too long and expect the rest to know
what we are all talking about)
.

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