Rant

[mtupyro.livejournal.com]

(x-posted to personal LJ)

Fuck. Now I'm just pissed off. I get thrown a ticket because the owner of said ticket hasn't done anything on it in 2 weeks. There's an email from the user asking for an update on the 11th and no response whatsoever. It's not like it's a difficult problem or anything either. So now I get to deal with a pissed off user due to no fault of my own and it makes me look bad because I have to clean up someone else's mess. I fucking hate lazy people, especially when they make my life more difficult.

Finally, some sanity!

[rose-welch.livejournal.com]

 http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080225/wr_nm/internet_fcc_dc;_ylt=Aqxm2xtM3jJkAcO97BhpVW5k24cA 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080225/ap_on_hi_te/fcc_internet_regulation

I can't believe the government is doing something that I'm happy abou! I totally thought they'd be on the side of Big Business! *does a happy dance*

Windows Vs Linux

[dragonbofh.livejournal.com]

A lady collared me this morning nice and early about her laptop failing to boot with part of windows reported as missing or corrupt.
No major biggie I've dealt with this before.
I run a few tests, try a few methods of repair but very little works. I decide that it'll be quicker to pull her data off the machine, rebuild and then transfer her data back onto the machine than it will be to wait for the various fixes to run through and potentially not work.

This is not the TSH.

The TSH is that it took me all of 45 minutes to copy ~9gig of her data over to the local server... using a live boot of Ubuntu.
I've now been using a Windows Command Line to copy her data back over to the laptop... almost 3 hours and it's still going... What the holy crap?

Screwed!

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

It's very good advice to those who don't already know that doing tech support for your family is a bad idea(tm). I do it anyway because we have a luser in our family that 1) doesn't know what he's doing, 2) yells at everyone for doing it wrong anyway, and 3) will jump at the opportunity to try to fix computer problems if given half a chance. The personal suffering I take is moderate in comparison to how he can screw things up that I'll just have to fix anyway.

Rewind to last week. MIL calls me cause she's got a registry file failure. Simple enough, I walk her through the Recovery Console, warning her this is going to take a while. Admin password lockout. Shit, was installed as SP1. Need to crack it, so take a trip out this last weekend to do the job.

Crack works successfully, but it fails a chkdsk after getting in. Advise new hard drive (and some memory while we're at it). Being she has faith in me, she obliges, as well as the external hard drive for backups she needs to keep (said other party has screamed at her to do this and has these elaborately convoluted schemes for doing them - literally, there are thousands of floppy disks strewn across his house as well as the last 20 years of several computer magazines, and yet he STILL sucks). It's late, so we decide we'll continue the next day.

Ok. Start disassembling the laptop for parts install. Get the drive caddy out, and realize that Dell fuckin' TORQUED the screws in! Somebody has to have an eyeglass screwdriver on a DeWalt or something to get them in that tight. Got three of them out with a pair of vise grips and said screwdriver. Fourth one... no go. It stripped.

Drive's already toast and the computer's OOW. But I need this damn caddy to mount the new drive. We search the garage for anything that might do the job. This is what we find:

1) A chisel
2) A hammer
3) A C-clamp

For shits and giggles I'm going to see if the drive survived this, but I'm really not betting on it. I did get through the screw and the caddy survived intact. I was able to mount the new drive and get on with life and reinstalling the computer. I was rather scared because the memory door was torqued in just as bad and only supported by plastic, but managed to get in.

Oh, remember said luser who always finds what you did to be wrong? Sure, I was wrong. I didn't send it to Dell for an OOW replacement.

Tech Support Macro

[glitteringlynx.livejournal.com]

This was just posted to goth_macros and thought you guys (and gals!) might also get a laugh. :)

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