Had yet another inept user come in.

Gawd, I really get a lot of them don't I? Still, I would guess that if they had any idea what they where doing, they wouldn't come to me in the first place…

Anyway.

Another laptop came in (seems to be a lot of these recently, people gotten fed-up with desktops now or something?) and once again, the hard drive has crashed.

By crashed, I mean crashed.

I said to the customer that I might be able to rescue some of the data, and we'll go from there.

So, I pop out the lappys hard drive, stick it into a USB caddy, hook it up to a machine, and see what I could grab from it.

Among most of the unreadable sectors, I manage to find some remains of the users My Documents folder, which contained the usual suspects such as a few MP3s, Jpegs, Word docs and the like. So off I go, grabbing what little stuff could be found, thinking that the customer would be thrilled.

Next up, was ordering in a new drive, installing that, popping Windows back on, and generally getting the machine to a working state.

After putting back the data I managed to retrieve, job done, call customer, let them know it's ready to be collected, and move on to the next job.

well, it's not quite that simple really is it?

No.

A few days later (i.e. yesterday morning) I get an hysterical phone call.

"you've lost all my important pictures! What am I going to do now? I need those pictures!"

etc. 

So, after explaining to her that I had managed to only recover the data she has there from her previously crashed hard drive, she then starts screaming "I don't care that that's all you managed to recover! I want my pictures!"

Bit pissed off now, as she obviously wasn't listening to reason, I decide to tell her that she has two options.

1: Travel back in time and make a back-up of those pictures that where so important to her, so important in fact that she never bothered to perform a back-up in the first place.

2: Bugger off on holiday again, and re-enact all the images she lost, get home, transfer them from the camera, and then back them up. 

Here's a good one….

Had a laptop come in, right?

Well, apparently the couples kids where using it to download music and the thing had decided to crash on them.

Now, none of that is unusual, most of the work I get in seems to be caused by kids just clicking away, looking at whatever they think is the latest-and-greatest.

Also, it seems I was right when I said to the parents 'I bet they where using Limewire'

Anyhoo, i'm sure that most people are familiar with the now infamous BSOD. Well, the machine was crashing with one of those error screens that we know and love, but, as is default with WinXP, it was displaying that, performing a memory dump, then shutting down.

So, what do these kids do in order to read what was on the screen? Well, they keep  power-cycling the bloody laptop, and writing down part of the error message that's visible in that short space of time.

And as this laptop has 512 meg of ram, 128 of it shared out to the integrated graphics, that's not really a lot of time to perform a memory dump and shut down, is it?

So that'll probably be a total of around 150 or so reboots then.

And they wondered why the hard drive was buggered…..