I had another chat with my family that never call me out side of help.
To para paraphrase ....Its I bought this cheap ride on lawn mower with a touch screen display. Can you get GPS and bluetooth audio workin on it....
Me Im Ive never seen or tryied that before I dont know.
Your good with PC's but !
... :(
@NZSNIPER Funking genius!
@Marten And ya. I feel ya. Mom called me at 2130 the other night when her PC shut down in the middle of surfing the web.
TLDR: Having a 550w APC UPS does not like having a 430w PC, 42inch tv, router and desktop speakers and then another 50w heating pad. The breaker in the UPS tripped.
The PC is fine. A budget AMD build with ElementaryOS.
The expectation that you can sort anything even remotely technical. I know my Mum is a clever person but it's like she refuses to even try. It's not like this is new to her, she has worked with computers since the late 70's. I can understand it from my Aunt, not the smartest person. My Sisters have their husbands and they do their best. But why my sisters do it themselves, relying on their husbands to sort out any issues they have with their computers. I'm amazed how long they are willing to wait as well. I will turn up for some other reason only to discover a laundry list of things that in some cases might have been for months! Do they try to fix it? No just turn it off till I come around. Good thing I enjoy this type of thing. May be it's just to get me out of the room letting them chat to my wife. I know I can be opinionated and boring but breaking computers just to keep me out of the way?
I know the feeling. I've made it a rule now with my family that with a few exceptions I'm only interested if I built the PC and therefore installed the OS and everything on it.
This has the added value of meaning I can get them all onto machines with half decent Skylake i3s and SSDs with 8GB of DDR4 which have a tendency to just work therefore cutting down the time I spend fixing things :D
If they buy a machine from the local guy down the road and it has a problem guess what? Take it back to the guy cause I'm not interested...
Installing a VR headset on that Lawnmower will solve all your problems:)
Thankfully I have convinced my family that I'm too busy to deal with their problems for free, lol. I'm kind of mean, but seriously the struggles they have are ridiculous.
Situations like these are also annoying... You bought a 400$ laptop from Best Buy, but you didn't ask me, the one person who could've told you to buy something worlds better?
You deserve the lawnmower.
I totally know hot it feels. Sometimes hear my father walking down the hallway and I know he's coming for me to ask something about his tech gadgets (if something has some sort of CPU and he doesen't know what to do I'm the one to ask). On the flip side my mother learns a lot better but also doesen't tinker with much tech in the first place. When I see my brother come to me I always fear that something happened to his PC, that somehow broke down (he kinda takes care of it but doesen't do that many things that involve risky things).
30secs rant: I HATE with all myself when a friends of my father tell him how to do things (the wrong way or how I wouldn't do those myself) and he asks me if what he's doing is correct. And if I have to say something about it things might go out of control.
I went over to my uncle's house for thanksgiving and before leaving...
"Hey can you look at this NVR system before you go?
Charge them, usually stops any free loading uncles and aunts. As for immediate family... feel like its the least I could do.
Being the family tech is one of the most thankless positions you can be in within the family social order.
True Story:
I was at my brothers one year for Thanksgiving. We showed up about 2 hours early so I could hang with my brother as well as my nieces. Everyone had the same idea so we actually had the whole family at the house tow hours before meal time, cool. NOT!
So while sitting at the table talking to my brother my sister comes up and says, "I figured while you were here I would bring my laptop over for you to look at it is running slow." Now in fairness she did say hi first but she did not ask about how things were going, she started with a work request. Okay cool, not a big deal and I can talk to my brother while working on her laptop. Well that was the beginning. Within the next 10 minutes I have 4 more laptops in front of me. Seems everyone figured this was a tech clinic, not a family gathering.
Over the next 4+, yes 4+ hours works on driver updates, cleaning spyware, tracking down bad installs and so on. The whole time I was being pressured to get it done soon for two of them as they wanted them for their WoW RAID later that day. I am sometimes just to nice of a guy so I kept quiet and kept working. When I finished everyone was excited and vanished to use their now working computers. Meanwhile I was finally going to eat except the food, including desserts had been picked over, I was eating cold leftovers essentially.
As the evening ended I was amazed these same people came up and were giving me grief for not spending time with the family the whole day, just sitting there with my head stuck in a PC.
Christmas that year rolls around and it is at my house this time. As I meet each person at the door I ask if the laptop they are carrying is a gift for someone. If they so no I tell them to put it back in their car. A few people actually came a bit salty, saying they had thought to have me help them with a PC issue. I told them we could talk later. After the meal, I mean literally, I was deluged with PC questions and fix requests. I politely informed them that I was not working today, I was enjoying time with my family.
I have never seen the family clear out so fast in my life. Suddenly their plans to stay the day where being disrupted by forgotten visit requests :-) This was enough for my "free" service to my family to end.
My current policy for most of the family is they will pay me a fair rate for any work done and I will schedule time for them when I can. My brother still gets free PC work and some of the less obnoxious family members get the low cost of buying me a nice dinner for any work done that day.
You have to set boundaries with people or they will suck the life out of you for free tech support.
This is how I've found it to be, but I actually prefer it. Whenever I fix something for someone or they notice me doing something that they don't understand and they go "That's great that you know how to work stuff like that, you must be really clever." Then they make wishy-washy self-deprecating comments about their own inability to do things so simple that a 6-year-old could do it, if only they'd take 15 minutes to apply themselves to learning how to solve the problem. "I could never learn how to do that" or "I was never into that sort of thing so I don't think I'd be able to"...just really rubs me the wrong way with people, even if they have the best intentions. I prefer just being left to my devices, in both senses.
F*ck them and peripheral acquaintances!!!! They ask you for help, at a cost of your time and utilization of your knowledge without value or compensation!! If a plumber or mechanic "friend" provided a service, there usually would be some expectation of compensation be it friendly or formal.
I know a dentist who has an IT consultant for his business (and home) and he still grills me with questions, because hi doesn't want to pay an hourly rate to the consultant for stupid sh*t-f*ck questions.
I'm sorry, I'm not wasting my time to save anyone money for nothing.
You could tell those monkeys to go buy a Mac, but they would be just as f*ct.
I clean sweeped my daycare lady's computer, only because he watches my kid. And every heavy snowfall, her husband hits my driveway with his snowblower.
Unless they got something to horse trade with act aloof and plead ignorance.
If I were to do that, I'd have to feign amnesia xD cat's out of the bag, everyone thinks that because I have five monitors and a computer case open on my desk that I'm some evil super-IT-genius mad scientist, even though I'm actually just a power user and not a whole hell of a lot more at this point.
Ya and when they ask I say: WOW, XP?; malware this, and virus that. What no backups of a 7+ year old drive?
What you don't want to spend any money. Hmmmm. That would take a lot of time that I don't really have at this very moment.
After over 20 years of being the IT guy for the family, I've come up with a system.
Unless I did the initial load out on the system, they are on their own for support and can pay.
For other people, like my father, I've given him a regular user account and written the admin password down on a piece of paper, which I put in a sealed envelope. I will give my father unlimited support as long as he doesn't open the envelope with the admin password. If he opens the envelope, he has decided that he is the administrator, and is capable of administrating the system himself.
This is hard because a lot of programs are poorly written and need administrative privileges just to run. Those programs don't meet my quality standards, and are not allowed in my environment. Sorry.
This is the price of having unlimited free support. If they want more than the free tier, they can crack open their wallets and dig deep.
For other people who I do a la carte support for, I set them up with a regular user account, but I give them an obnoxiously difficult administrator password. Something like:
"I promise not to enter this administrator password unless I'm absolutely certain."
Since most people can't type more than a couple characters without fucking up, they are inhibited from using programs that require administrative privileges to run regularly. I usually get a lot of push back on this technique, but I explain that they should only have to enter this password when installing something, or doing an update, and that if a program suddenly asks for it unexpectedly, that they should hit cancel and not put it in. The password is so long and complex, that they actually will press cancel instead of mindlessly entering it.
With the exception of privilege escalation bugs/malware, Windows is reasonably secure. So if you can prevent users from granting programs admin privileges willy-nilly, you can keep the system operating for a long time.
That's how I lock my wife down. That what she gets for being a Windows peasant.
^This. I guarantee that 99.99% of viruses on computers are from people who ought to know better, clicking on a load of clickbait articles, spam emails and pop-ups and generally doing things with their machines that they shouldn't and should know they shouldn't. I've not had a single virus on my windows machine for years and years - regular cache and registry cleans and general upkeep and maintenance keep it running as fast as it can all the time.
I know the feeling. Happens to my dad, brother and I a lot. Quite annoying more than anything.