How far do you go?

[Piyono]

Client's machine.

You've disinfected, pared down the startup list, pruned the registry and streamlined the services. But the machine still crawls. Something still lurks beneath the surface, mocking you. You've reached your reasonable rate cap. A few more hours and the client may as well buy a new machine. How much time do you spend on trying to hunt down the invisible gremlin before you decide to backup, nuke and repopulate?

Yeah, I've got one of those now.

<grumble grumble>

 

[P5-133XL]

I try to be forthright and honest with the client and get them to decide. As a bias, I try encourage them to nuke early and then use the saved time to apply preventatives for the next installation.

 

[Piyono]

I'm as forthright as they come, but sometimes you get a computer that looks like it has a routine infection but it turns out to be the tip of the iceberg. Fix one thing and then three other problems appear. I explain to my "slow computer" clients that this might be the case and that the hours can pile up quickly. I tell them that reformatting is a routine procedure which will require a more-or-less fixed amount of time and will result in a computer that performs as well as or better than it did the day they first brought it home. (I'm a thorough backer-upper, too, and I usually restore as many of a client's personal settings as I can so that their computer feels familiar when they get it back).

Anyway, sometimes, I start a routine cleanup and before I know it three hours have passed and I sigh because I could already have reformatted, restored and been done with it. I get that stubborn drive, you know— "I've been working on this for three hours, now, so I MUST be close to done!". Sometimes I luck out and resolution comes around the next bend but sometimes it don't and I have to bite the bullet and start nuking.

I was just wondering how many others get caught up in the hunt for too long.

 

[ddrueding]

I give it one pass through the registry and startup files and one reboot. Total time less than half an hour. If that doesn't do it, I start preparing them for a complete nuke and pave. If they insist on me trying to fix it (don't have installation media for apps, etc). I do it right there while they are watching; that time adds up unbelievably fast, and I want them to be confident that I was working on it the whole time. It also gives me the opportunity to educate them on backup procedures, safe surfing methods, etc. Very rarely will one interest me enough that I will take it home and beat it up on my time, but it does happen.

 

[P5-133XL]

The people that cause me to be caught up are friends and family: They don't pay, so taking a long time isn't a problem for them. ohh, the horror stories that could be told about relatives that just won't learn because it just doesn't cost them enough but it costs me plenty.

 

[Chewy509]

For paying clients, 30mins at most. After that, backup, nuke and reload.

As for dealing with family members and friends. I try not to deal with these ones, as I've found it's more trouble than they're worth. Don't get me wrong, I do help them out, but for friends of friends especially, a bottle of good quality bourbon or vodka will generally get me interested. (I found this keeps them at arms length, unless they have a serious/urgent problem). A few have been offended when asked for some form of compensation, but I just reply, well do they do work for free?

As for horror stories, I nuked a system, only to find 1 week later a greater qty of malware had been installed than fisrt found when I originally nuked the box because the idiot thought that searching for pr0n on google and following random links was a good idea. Scored 3 bottles of bourbon for that mess... (He was my ex-wifes coworker).

 

[Piyono]

*sigh*
You guys nailed it... this is my dad's machine— and it was humming along just fine when I left it the week before.

Me: Well, what happened since I fixed it last time?
Dad: Happened? Uh, I don't know. Nothing.
Me: Did you install any software?
Dad: Software? No, I don't think so...
[as if on cue a popup ad window appears]
Me: Well, what's this?
Dad: Yeah, that's what's been happening! And I can't use Outlook!
Me: Dad... *sigh* ...let me sit down, please...

And so it begins.

 

[Bozo]

I have enough headaches at work let alone do it for family members on my time off. The last one I worked on was a very corrupted hard drive. After spending hours trying to recover data from the drive (there were no backups of course) I told the owner what I did, and what I tried and the reply was "Well, I could have done that". Take it to a PC shop, and pay through the nose.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

I'm going through that stuff with my father too.
He just retired. He used to own an engineering firm with many smart people working for him. He has a PhD. He's not an idiot.

But he browses porn with Internet Explorer, and he clicks on stuff that he shouldn't. Apparently the folks in his office were on the ball enough with their proxy server and security software that he mostly stayed out of trouble on his "business" machines, but now that he's home he doesn't have that stuff any more. He never even had to learn the "You don't click on links in E-Mail" lesson, either.

He still doesn't understand why I keep taking away his Internet Explorer Icon, either.

 

[Bozo]

Merc, I'm surprised you don't have your Dad on a Linux box???

Bozo :joker:

 

[ddrueding]

Now we are talking extreme measures. If I get called back to the same box a second time, after the nuke and pave they get to purchase Acronis Trueimage and they get a bootable restore DVD with the image on it. For some true insanity, a few of the users kept restoring the image and then "getting their machine ready for use" by installing "important software" that included a weather monitor in the status bar and webshots desktop. These people get an Ubuntu LiveCD and can access the data still on their hard drive if they like. This is the step before I tell them to find someone else.

 

[P5-133XL]

What I miss is GoBack. I found that to be invaluable for those intractible persons that insist upon playing roulette with their computers.

 

[Mercutio]

Merc, I'm surprised you don't have your Dad on a Linux box???

My mom is on a Linux box. She can get recipes, print and do Email, so she's happy.

My dad, who was a DEC guy before being a Sun guy before being a Windows guy (yup: he's one of about four people who was buying Itanium workstations) is now convinced that a home computer needs to have Internet Explorer and Outlook in order to be useful.

I've got him set up with IMAP through Gmail on Thunderbird, same as mom. He called one of the computer guys at his old office because "The kid didn't set it up right" so that he could get his stuff in Outlook instead.

And then he bitches because he can't receive Email attachments properly.

Same thing with web browsing.

And he loaded three different IM programs on the machine. And Mcafee Antivirus.


Basically, there's no arguing with him, because he's the successful businessman/engineer/patent-holding guy, so he clearly knows more about this stuff than I do.

It's a little bit of a sore spot for me.

 

[Mercutio]

What I miss is GoBack. I found that to be invaluable for those intractible persons that insist upon playing roulette with their computers.

You may in fact be the first computer person in the history of time to say that you miss Goback, and not in the verbal sense which involves some kind of firearm.

Anyway, you can get the same results with Acronis TrueImage, particularly the new Home versions with the "Snap Restore" feature.

 

[ddrueding]

Basically, there's no arguing with him, because he's the successful businessman/engineer/patent-holding guy, so he clearly knows more about this stuff than I do.

It's a little bit of a sore spot for me.

My dad did something similar. He went from Xerox PARC to AS/400 to Win 3.11 programming. Now he is solidly in the MS camp, dual-booting Vista Ultimate and XP. He uses Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Windows Defender. After explaining that I refuse to support clients who behave like that, and that I won't learn those programs just to support him, I don't support him anymore.

My mother's desk is opposite his in the office (used to be my bedroom). Hers is a little Shuttle dual-core with 3GB of RAM and an 80GB 2.5" hard drive. It runs XP Pro (so I can remotely maintain it), and does everything she wants. She has a Gmail account on my domain, runs Firefox and NOD32, and it just works.


I think one of the fundamental issues is what people do in their free time. My mother uses the computer as a tool, when she is done doing what she was there to do she goes and watches a movie on TV or gardens. When my dad has free time he screws around on his computer breaking stuff. This is the main distinction between users who break their machine and those who don't.

 

[sechs]

Where do smart people go wrong?

Digital Unix->SunOS->Windows
Unixware->OS/400->Windows

 

[Bozo]

Where do smart people go wrong?

Digital Unix->SunOS->Windows
Unixware->OS/400->Windows

I not that they went wrong. It is easier to earn a living writing for Windows.
But, some of the older skills might be useful. Try finding someone who is proficiant in OpenVMS.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

On a user level, I'm fine with VMS. Type "posix" at a prompt and everything is nice and appropriately *nix-y.

Anyway, my father switched because his tools did. I'm not sure how much time he spent designing circuits or whatever after he started his company, but he moved from DEC machines when Sun became the industry platform of choice, and he moved to Windows basically because that's where all the new tools were being released.

 

[Chewy509]

Where do smart people go wrong?

Digital Unix->SunOS->Windows
Unixware->OS/400->Windows

I don't think that's the right question. Actually what did MS do right to get people to move from *nix/VMS to Windows?

I can guess at a few answers:

1. Cheap Hardware
2. Windows OS is/was cheap against commercial *nix/VMS
3. Decent developer tools and documentation

 

[LiamC]

Actually what did MS do right to get people to move from *nix/VMS to Windows?

My money is on customisation. Never bet against a company that gives users the ability to personalise their toys. Windows 3.1 gave them colour schemes like Hot Dog. Windows 95 gave them Dangerous Animals themes. Vista gives them Aero.

Nokia gave people clickable covers in any colour you wanted and some you never imagined.

How many people do you know who will buy a base model car and option it to the hilt rather than buy a model further up the chain that has everything they want and is likely cheaper, and will hold it's resale better?

There are other reasons of course, like giving away their developer tools for peanuts.

 

[ddrueding]

I know for my dad it was his target audience. He was writing payroll software, and companies started doing away with their mainframes in favor of workstations and servers. Proper support for an AS/400 server is stupidly expensive (queue fushigi).

 

[mubs]

You guys are forgetting hardware. It was all proprietary stuff before. With windows, hw became a commodity - interchangeable, cheap, reliable, readily available. The mini manufacturer I worked for went under because they never saw the Wintel tsunami coming.

 

[Fushigi]

With an AS/400 (now IBM i) you actually get support. Level 1 folks are actually knowledgeable & aren't using scripts. They can call in Level 2 people as needed. Level 2s can bring in the developers who wrote the code. This is typically done in one call, although they've no problem providing their direct phone numbers should a callback be necessary. They are also unhurried and will work with you until you are satisfied, which can include after the problem itself is resolved. And they're more than likely going to be located in Rochester (MN), Atlanta, or Toronto so there's no ESL barrier.

It's worth the money.

A single midrange machine can handle multiple workloads, and the machines scale. Example: We have literal farms of Windows servers to run Exchange for a little over 30K named (not concurrent) employees; a single POWER5 server (two chip generations old) can handle 175,000 concurrent users with sub-second response (sub tenth of a second, actually). Yeah, that machine ain't cheap, but it still takes less than one FTE to administer.

Hardware-wise, IBM has moved the AS/400 to the POWER platform that also runs AIX & Linux. It still isn't quite commodity, but prices are way down I'll take our RAID cards & hot swappable CPUs any day over what a commodity x64 box supplies.

 

[Mercutio]

In my father's case, I think it's that "good enough" tools became available for Windows systems starting in the mid to late 1990s (he was evaluating NT on Intel starting with version 3.1), and either stopped being available on Sun machines or became too expensive compared to similar software on Windows/Intel machines.

Getting back to the original intent of this thread:
If I'm working for a business, for myself, I give one run through my standard cleanup procedure, which usually takes about 15 minutes (Spybot + Hijack This, basically), and then I re-image.

If I'm working at my trainer job, I am working on someone's home PC. In this case, I have a different mandate. Technically, the agreement to get me to do tech work goes like this: They "pay" my company for three (or in extreme cases, six) hours of trainer time out of their Career Training funds ($250 or $500 - they get $3000 a year). Theoretically, the people doing this can sit with me and I will explain what I'm doing as I do it. In practice, people drop shit off and I get to it when I get to it. Most jobs are simple spyware cleanups or Norton/Mcafee removals, but I can use that money to replace parts if I have to, and it's not uncommon for me to have to buy a PSU or hard disk to complete a job.
Needless to say, that level of payment justifies more effort on my part. I've been known to spend several days fully removing spyware, just to see how it works, but most typically, if I spend more than about 90 minutes on something, it's wipe and reload time. Those people probably get something closer to the value of their money.

Generally the only people who get charged $500 are the real assholes or people who need major hardware overhauls (motherboard/RAM/CPU jobs).

I will not even get in to how my company justifies my doing PC repair work out of training funds but it winds up being a good thing for all parties involved. The folks I do it for get the work done "free" and my company makes a ton of money for doing it.

 

[Piyono]

If I'm working at my trainer job...

What is your "trainer" job?

 

[Mercutio]

What is your "trainer" job?

My day job is to teach computer skills to employees of local steel mills. This is about 50% professional certification stuff (Microsoft Certifications) and about 50% total bullshit (Convert your home videos to DVD).

My schedule isn't fixed, so it's pretty common for me to work 40 hours in three or four days, and have the rest of the week to myself. I use the rest of the time to deal with my own customers.

 

[Piyono]

My day job is to teach computer skills to employees of local steel mills. This is about 50% professional certification stuff (Microsoft Certifications) and about 50% total bullshit (Convert your home videos to DVD).

My schedule isn't fixed, so it's pretty common for me to work 40 hours in three or four days, and have the rest of the week to myself. I use the rest of the time to deal with my own customers.

Neat. Is it emotionally and mentally sustainable?

 

[Piyono]

One of my regulars had a sinister infection the other week. It required a reformat but I was looking at a bug I had not encountered before so I gave it a fight for a few hours before throwing in the towel, chalking it up to on-the-job training.

Of course, I was feeling especially generous with this particular client, a chiropractor, given that he fixed - right then, in his den - an incredibly sharp pain I'd been experiencing in my shoulder area for the last few months (for those interested, my top rib was rotated a few degrees, and my scapula and clavicle were also out of alignment, all following a jarring blow administered by the pavement upon being ejected from my bicycle whilst traveling downhill at high speed. Yes, I was wearing a helmet, which emerged from the incident unscathed).

I'm so happy about my newly restored freedom of movement that I'm considering knocking a couple of hours off the invoice.

OK, maybe an hour.

 

[Mercutio]

Neat. Is it emotionally and mentally sustainable?

The point of working the way I do is so that I do not have time to think about anything but the next place I am going to do work, or the next thing I need to get done. If I stop, depression takes over and then I can't get anything done in the first place.

Since I've been doing things this way for six weeks with no real breaks or vacations, I guess that it is sustainable.

--

As far as other things, I've seen a huge number of cases of XP Antivirus on PCs just in the last week or so. It looks like a lot of sites claiming to offer funny or pornographic videos are prompting people to install a compromised video codec, which seems to be the trojan that gets things going most of the times I've seen it.

It's only ~20 minutes to fix it with Malwarebytes but I can't believe there isn't any other program yet that even detects it, and it's really, really irritating to find a whole office full of people who all have it.

Windows Security software is retarded.

 

[MaxBurn]

Hopefully you feel the same way after six months and a year. Now that I have worked from home for a year I kinda really frikin want to go back to making site visits all the time. Thought I would love it at first though. Three or four days with three or four off sounds good especially if it is semi random and rarely on weekends. I am a big weekends must be free person myself, when planning things for others that's the only times everyone can get together.

 

[Mercutio]

Did I say weeks?
I meant years.

I've been on the clock 27 of the last 48 hours and worked two normal 8 hour days as a trainer on top of that, and that's the way I actually like things.

I can't quite get away with working from home. I usually associate "home" with "needing to look for more work" (even as I have four VNC windows open doing unbilled server management for clients...) so it would probably drive me nuts after a while.

 

[Howell]

Merc, you should consider setting your client up on a service contract. Then you wouldn't do that maintenance work for free.

 

[sechs]

And you can remember us when you're rich....

 

[Mercutio]

Nothing I'm doing is making me rich. Had I to guess, I'd say that Fushigi probably has double the annual income I do (including his benefits etc), and ddrueding probably manages some in the same general ballpark with about half the hours worked.

I'm not doing what I do for money, either.

 

[Mercutio]

Merc, you should consider setting your client up on a service contract. Then you wouldn't do that maintenance work for free.

Some of my clients are on a service contract. In other cases, I do the work anyway just because I don't want there to be a crisis that would reflect poorly on me.

 

[sechs]

This is some kind of stupid American work ethic, right?

I mean, if they don't pay for the work, it doesn't get done, and stuff explodes, how can you be to blame? All that's going to happen is that they expect more work for free.

Isn't illegal to work for free?

 

[ddrueding]

IT work is not like other jobs. To most of your clients, you are a magician. They don't know what you are doing, they don't know how you do it, and they don't want to know. The only confidence they have in you is based on the performance of the entire system.

I think the closest thing would be auto mechanics; but most people know at least one or two of them.

 

[sechs]

Sounds like a good reason to constantly overcharge for labour....

 

[ddrueding]

Sounds like a good reason to constantly overcharge for labour....

Yup.

 

[Howell]

Some of my clients are on a service contract. In other cases, I do the work anyway just because I don't want there to be a crisis that would reflect poorly on me.

Yeah that's where the sales part of your job comes in. To communicate clearly and effectively the ramifications of their decisions. Sometimes they have to say no because it is not in their budget but at least you have given them enough information for their risk assessment.

But you are right those are the most difficult clients. Some people you can not afford to have as clients.