On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:26:12 -0600, Vic Smith
wrote:

On Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:12:11 -0600, Hell Toupee
wrote:


I'm glad you learned it. I build my own, so I don't shop for
off-the-shelf desktop pcs for myself. OTOH, they make sense for a
significant proportion of the home user market - those people who
pretty much just surf the web, do email, do a little bit of word
processing and other low-level tasks. Even so, there are far, far
better buys on the market than Dells.

I fix pcs on the side and the most aggravating ones to deal with are
the positively ancient pcs - ones so slow they take fifteen or twenty
minutes to boot. They have software and hardware conflicts due to the
age of the machine, and they get infested with malware because the
pc's protective software is too old to be updated, or they never used
it in the first place. Trying to convince those owners that it is way
past time to replace the pc is usually futile, because: they paid
twelve hundred bucks for that (primitive) pc back in 1999. And that's
more than they paid for their refrigerator, by damn, and they've had
the fridge for twenty-five years, so the pc should be good for at
least as long!

I describe these dinosaurs as "legacy machines" on my fee list, and
charge a surcharge for working on them _because_ they're so slow, and
time is money, after all. It still just kills me how many people are
willing to spend well over a hundred bucks to keep a dinosaur going
when they can get a new and much, much better box off the shelf for as
little as $300.

Crazy stuff. I build my own too. You must have incredible patience
to deal with your customers. Hope you don't do much work over the
phone.
Every time I walk through PC issues on the phone with family members,
I lose it at least once.

--Vic

Have you ever tried GBridge? It lets you take control of the remote
computer (with a Gmail account). My sister is so computer illiterate,
I don't think she would be able to set this up. I would really like
something that would let me take control of her computer. She is a
natural blonde. She really really doesn't get computers.