How NOT To Get Your Computer Repaired
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This is long and probably rambling… But if you’ve got a few minutes to kill, maybe you can get some amusement from my trials.
Usually, Wolf takes care of any computer issues we have. But between the crashed external hard drive and the fact that he hasn’t kept his tech knowledge up to date over the last few years, we decided to call in a professional when things got ugly last year, especially since it looked like a hardware problem.
I mentioned it at a mom’s group, and one of the leaders mentioned that her husband fixed computers for a living. She said she could take the computer home to have him fix it, and she’d make sure he gave me a good price.
How could you go wrong?
Many ways, naturally… Including the fact that I now worry about the awkwardness if I go back to that group, which I would greatly miss. (Hence the fact that I shall also refrain from mentioning his name or company).
It started out well enough, under the circumstances.
It took MUCH longer than he’d predicted. This because he was working me in around other projects, to keep the costs down. Okay, I can accept that.
He cleaned inside the laptop, replaced a fan, recovered the data from the crashed external drive, etc. Everything was supposed to be perfect.
Well, not so much.
I got the computer back and paid the invoice (more than I’d hoped, but less than I’d feared). Quickly, I found a number of annoying, quirky things with my computer:
- 2 of the little rubber feet (that buffer the lid/screen from the base/keyboard when closed) were missing. When I asked him, Phil shrugged it off saying, “Gosh, I never noticed, since most people *are* missing some. I certainly was not (my laptop is mostly a desktop), and I resen this damge!
- It now makes a “ticking” noise when it accesses the hard drive. This appears to be a sound effect, not a mechanical noise, as I can stop it by muting the sound. But neither “Phil” nor anyone else has been able to tell me how to actually stop it.
- He partitioned the hard drive. Although I saw this mentioned on the invoice, I didn’t grasp the ramifications. It was never explained or discussed, and he definately never asked if I wanted him to reconfigure my entire system in this way. More on his later…
- We went through some awkwardness (some struggling ourselves, some on the phone with him), since he had made an “Administrator” account separate from *my* administrator account, and there were duplicates of all the user folders sitting around, etc…
Anyhow, things chugged along more or less smoothly after that.
Phil was even kind enough to do a brief remote session a month or so later and track down a wild lag problem that suddenly showed up (to a toolbar Nick had installed to earn credits in a Facebook game! Grrr!), and not bill me for it.
Almost a year has come and gone, now. One day I looked up and realized that I was getting to the performance-reducing level of “low space available” on my “C” drive; there was still ample space on the fictitious “D” drive.
Partitioning is not my thing. I know nothing about it beyond general theory. This is not something with which I could just start mucking about.
So I called Phil, and explained that his partitioning ha caused a problem that I didn’t know how to even begin to deal with.
We talked about it a little on the phone, then he initiated a remote control session.
He cleared out (yet another) set of duplicate User folders on the C: drive (since they aparently belong on the D: drive), as well as a few other unused file sets. He downloaded a couple of tools to use to view the file structure and such, and also downloaded the lastest update to my anti-virus software and got that running.
When he was done, there was some space on C:, but still not an awful lot.
He actually chided me for installing games “which use a disproportionate amount of disk space. If I wanted to do that, he said, I should load them on the D: drive.
Well, excuse me, but the games do not use a DISPROPORTIONATE amount of space, actually. This is not a new or high-end computer, and we can’t even play the games that are REAL hogs! Besides, as you’ll recall, I never asked to have the drive partitioned, he never explained its proper usage, and he definately never asked what kind of software I would be likely to install in the future. Bah!
Whatever, at least it was fixed.
Except that it wasn’t.
Suddenly one of the games I had been playing regularly refused to run. And the next time we tried to watch DVD movie, it was skipping and laggy – totally unusable.
Argh!
An email resolved the game issue, but the DVDs were a different story. He said I needed to update my video driver (why only then, all of a sudden after he worked on the computer?), but that the update driver was not available to the public because of some agreement between the hardware manufacturers and he computer companies.
He sent me an email explaining a tool that could be used to get, modify and install the driver. He told me to dowload it, and said he would call back that evening to do another remote session and install it.
I did my part, but he never called back.
Exasperated, the following day I read through all the techno-babble and figured out how to do it myself. I am now the proud owner of updated video drivers… Which did not solve the problem.
The next time I heard from Phil it was an email from someone else (he has someone do his QuickBooks and billing, and pretends it’s a whole big company), sending me an invoice for his services!
I responded to the email as follows (edited for anonymity):
I am troubled by this invoice.
Phil partitioned my hard drive when he serviced my computer last year, without my knowledge or consent, and without giving me any instruction for using the C: and D: drives properly to avoid this kind of problem.
So this problem only occurred because he partitoned the drive; and further even then it only happened because he did not instruct me in using said partitioned drive. So what happened here was him correcting his own problems.
Further, a lot of the things done during this remote (such as updating my antivirus software), are things I did not ask to be done, and could perfectly well have done myself.
And, finally, my system is now broken, due to whatever changes he made. He instructed me to download a file that he says will fix it, and said he would do another remote and fix it… But has not gotten back in touch with me to do so. Some simple instructions for doing it myself would be much appreciated, at this point.
All in all, I would like (a) my computer to be restored to working order, and (b) this invoice to be nullified.
Eventually, I got an email response from him that I considered rather snotty.
He again chided me for installing such large games. (Why didn’t he look what was on the computer when he got it? Or ask me how I use it?) He said that it is not his practice to ask clients how they want their system set up (yikes!), and this is how he always does it. And so on.
He provided me the instructions for installing the new video driver (which you’ll recall I had already figured out and done), and, at least, agreed to zero out the invoice – only because of the delay in getting the video fixed, he insisted!
I thanked him for crediting the invoice, confirmed that I had installed the video driver, and – just for the sake of clarity – told him that it had not solved the DVD problem.
Naturally, this was not yet the end.
Received second invoice – with late fee.
*sigh*
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