Fixing someones computer story

Operating Systems & Open Source Windows
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Need a place to vent., kinda long

 I went to a friend of my parents house to fix their pc.   Its a 6-7 year old machine with vista and 2gb of ram with some intel pentium dual core.  It was running very slow, locked up every so often and and was very slow loading internet pages.  He was also running Mcafee Anti Virus (which I hate) and said that after he renewed subscription is when he noticed all this started.  After attempting to trouble shoot it the best possible thing to do was wipe and start over.  First thing i asked was is there anything that needs to be backed up.  He mention some tax files and some pictures so i copied everything out of my documents, pictures, music video folders etc.  There wasnt much in.  I ask 3 or 4 times if there was anything else he could think and i explained 3 or 4 times that when i reinstall windows it will erase everything and it will look like it did the day he bought it.  He said ok do it.  Long story short after i reinstalled updates  and service packs it runs miles better than it did considering how old it is running vista.  He then informed that there were all these pictures of his daughter going back several years that he wanted back.  Of course they werent in that folder so i regretted to inform him that they were gone.  He got pretty angry.  It was at this point i figured out just how computer illiterate he was.  He wanted to know where he could access the web camera so he could talk to his daughter, he said he wanted the program back.  I could reinstall the program for him but he had no idea what program it was or how to get into it.  He's one of these users that if something looks slightly diffrent than what he is used to, he gets confused and has to "relearn.  It was part virus and and his DSL is the reason it was loading so slowly, he still has to call Att so get that straight.   So ya, frustrating story of that day, i guess i better get used to it given that its my career feild.  Thoughts and comments are welcome.

1 Like
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And this...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is why paragraphs were invented.

But on a different note, I get how you feel. I really gets up my nerves when I come across people like this. You tell them one thing and they answer an entirely different question! Don't worry though, at least you know that you didn't make the mistake.

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This happens every time. There are 3 fixes to this problem

1. Use Recuva to recover the files. You will need to do it as soon as posible but it works really well.

2. Just back up the whole drive. Hdd space is fairly cheap and ppl like that dont tend to use much so its fairly quick and easy to just dump their 20gb of data into a folder.

3 Get paid before you format that way when they turn around and say "Remember when I said I had backups? I lied." You can just strut out the door.

 

2 Likes
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Will Recuva work even though the drive has been reformated via the recovery discs?

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yes, it will look for files in the deep scan that have not been overwritten.

 

OP, use photorec (made by same people). It will scan for image types only.

 

You'll need a big-ass external hard drive to copy the photos.

 

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yup. I had some files on a hardrive with ntfs, then I formated the disk and installed Linux, then I formated it again with NTFS. it worked.

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THIS! I have had so many people who i have asked 100 times if they wanted to save something so now i just ask for an external hdd to save their entire harddisk(Minus all the stuff i know is not important, mostly its just the user folder which for most people contains 99% of their essential files) and now i have never had problems with reinstalling other peoples computers.

I feel for you, its never a great situation to be in. Like @steven4570 said, try recuva to see if any of the files are recoverable

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4 years later... @moderators

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Lol, sorry, popped up in my feed, and did not see it was from 4 years ago.... Quite sorry :cry: