mine goes to 11
Jan. 30th, 2009 01:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceagleHere's a list rating the difficulty of computer detoxification:
1. trivial or overlooked "d'oh!"-type fixes
2. simple items, but never learned by user
3. more advanced items, but not known by user
4. careless items, like no backups or no/expired anti-virus, but fixable
5. easy to detect hardware issues, fixable
6. heavy-research fixes, but solve-able
7. hard to detect hardware issues, fixable
8. difficult infections, fixable, but resulting in some data loss
9. customer withholds information, expecting a miracle.. can be fixed, but may not be worth it timewise
10. unfixable software issues - less expensive
11. unfixable hardware issues - more expensive
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I just dealt with an "8"... user has three anti-virus programs running, all expired. Plus, the kids download all sorts of what-not on the machine, and the owner is trying to manage a financial database on it for her charity, with all this other havoc going on.
Last week she encountered a "failed disk read" error... machine would not start up at all.. not even safe mode.
She did not have any backups, and did not have an original startup disk. It was unclear if a virus had seeped in, or an imminent HD failure was coming, or both.
After about three hours, I got it running again, but it was tenuous at best... I told her to get at least one anti-virus up to date, and do some backups.
I got a call the next day, saying she couldn't find all the files she used to have, just a few. She still hadn't done either of the things I recommended. :/
1. trivial or overlooked "d'oh!"-type fixes
2. simple items, but never learned by user
3. more advanced items, but not known by user
4. careless items, like no backups or no/expired anti-virus, but fixable
5. easy to detect hardware issues, fixable
6. heavy-research fixes, but solve-able
7. hard to detect hardware issues, fixable
8. difficult infections, fixable, but resulting in some data loss
9. customer withholds information, expecting a miracle.. can be fixed, but may not be worth it timewise
10. unfixable software issues - less expensive
11. unfixable hardware issues - more expensive
-
I just dealt with an "8"... user has three anti-virus programs running, all expired. Plus, the kids download all sorts of what-not on the machine, and the owner is trying to manage a financial database on it for her charity, with all this other havoc going on.
Last week she encountered a "failed disk read" error... machine would not start up at all.. not even safe mode.
She did not have any backups, and did not have an original startup disk. It was unclear if a virus had seeped in, or an imminent HD failure was coming, or both.
After about three hours, I got it running again, but it was tenuous at best... I told her to get at least one anti-virus up to date, and do some backups.
I got a call the next day, saying she couldn't find all the files she used to have, just a few. She still hadn't done either of the things I recommended. :/
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-30 10:20 am (UTC)XD
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Date: 2009-01-31 08:46 am (UTC)user: "This acts like a bug"
microsoft: "no, that's a feature!" ;D
no subject
Date: 2009-01-31 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 06:47 am (UTC)Still, I don't do it as often as businesses do... prolly should do ever week, but sometimes months go by for me too....
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 08:14 pm (UTC):)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-02 06:22 am (UTC)