Exaggerators .... Pfft..

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My first laptop was £1600 5 years ago :eek: still use it not a bad little speed demon 15" screen, 40gb hdd, 1.6ghz Penitum M and 1gb of ram thinking of installing windows 7 on it. The main flaw is that its no longer "portable" the battery will only charge when It feels like it which is a bugger as its a on power control chip problem not batter or charger making it more expensive to fix then the laptop is worth.

What lappy is it mate I know a palce that sells new batteries for older laptops.
 
I have 3 batteries for it thats not the problem its the onboard control I believe. Quite funny really my tx1000 with maryan I can't get the wireless to work (I just haven't sat down and actually tried to yet) and with my other laptop the acer T290 the wireless works but the battery doesn't. As a result I mainly use the ipod touch and psp when away from my desk.
 
I get these about once every 2 months or so. These are the people that have desided to buy thier first computer, or upgrade that really old 6 year old computer. So they figured that they are going to by a few magazines like PC User or APC or PC Authority. Then suddenly they become a computer expert. However they start going on about how they need a computer with the latest expensive chipset and big video card.... and all they are using it for is to surf the internet and MS word.
Ohm man, those are the best! At Circuit City we called em "Magazine Readers" and the nick name stuck. It was the best when they'd come in with their copy of PC World and refuse to buy any laptop without a dedicated video card.

"Why do you want a dedicated card so bad?"
"Because it's better."
"But do you play games or edit movies?"
"No...."
"So you're not going to notice a difference at all, you're just wasting money."
"No...It's better!"

Those people live and die by what those uninformative rags have in their articles. I think it was PC World who had a Vista article that unanimously recommended Windows Vista Ultimate for power users, which they classified as ALL readers of their magazine. So of course all the "Magazine Readers" who wanted computers then refused to get one without Vista Ultimate. These of course were mostly basic users, Word and Email only. I don't think Drive Encryption and the half dozen other obscure features of Ultimate would have done them any good but they had to have it. A few stubborn-as-mule folks actually plopped down $279+$100 in labor for the Vista Ultimate Upgrade tehy were so sure it's what they needed.
 
!?

Microsoft or C++ courses? Coding doesn't help with repairing computers... unless your fixing software bugs?

Your supposed to get certifications and such for actually putting together computers and such. There's a forum showing what you need and talking about it on here somewhere.

Ok, cool.. Thanx for the advice, seriously.. I'm lost as to what I would need to be able to make some money doing this.. I was gonna wander into that "PC Careers and schooling" room, but haven't gotten around to it yet.


YEah, that was a spot on post.
 
Your friend seems a bit weird.
From what you've told me, he wanted you to build his system. Then all you did was give him advice on what to stick in there. He decided not to take your advice.
So then he picks out his own gear for the rig, but has his friend Aeron put it together for him. Then he doesn't remember what parts he put in there, and furthermore requires your help to make the OS/software run faster.

Dude, that's just a confusing story LOL
It seems to me that if he can pick out every component that goes into the machine, there would be no need to have someone physically build it. If you got all the parts, just start snapping them into place. The only tricky part might actually be spreading the thermal compound, and hooking up all the PSU connectors. I haven't built my own computer, but I probably will in the next week or so. And to be honest, those are the only two things that intimidate me. But the Mobo manual should be pretty clear on where to plug the PSU connectors.

It just seems weird to me that this buddy of yours needs your help tweaking the OS and software to make his computer run faster. I'd think as a rule of thumb, if you can't figure out "RUN – MSCONFIG" and cancel the unneeded 30 programs that load up on start, than you got no business trying to build a computer. I mean, you'd have to have a little software knowledge to build a computer; like taking a blank unformatted hard drive, popping win98 startup in the floppy, format the HDD, then pop in your OS (assuming this is not an Apple). Actually on newer computers I doubt you'd need a floppy boot disk to setup a partition. My comp won't boot from the CD.

Also, I have a policy when tweaking someone's computer: I typically don't!
Years ago, for my mom, my neighbor, and my mom's neighbor, I tweaked their computer (cancelling unneeded startup crap, defragmenting it, setting their CRT refresh rate to something other than 60Hz, temporarily installing and running a few different malware detectors, turning off all the sound effects and visual effects and the massive BMP desktop background image).
After doing these simple things their computer ran at nearly twice the speed. Boot time went from about 7 minutes to about 3 minutes and so on. But then they did nothing but complain about it: "where's my desktop wallpaper? How come all of my instant messengers aren't loading at startup? What happened to all the sound effects?"
I then had to explain it was all of these things being loaded up and put into memory at startup that was the majority of the computer's lag. But apparently they wanted all of these useless things. And lord, they wanted that 1MB background image so bad on their desktop.
And of course, if anything goes wrong with the computer a week later, your phone will be ringing and they will be asking "What's wrong with my computer? What did you do to it?" And in nearly every case what the problem is has nothing to do with what you did. But still, that error message wasn't there until a few days after you worked your magic on the computer, so it must be your fault. And the statute of limitation on how long it's been since you touched their computer and when they see an error, knows no bounds.

So my policy is, I don't help people with their computers, unless their computer's are broken (won't start). Or I am willing to do something with their computer only after they agree that if something goes wrong, don't look at me.
 
Friend of mine used to be full of $#!+. Like back in 1999, he was going on about alot of crap.

Like he was saying he had things like
100Gb SCSI Hard drive
PCMCIA 3d Excellerators for notebook computers
Unheard of monitor sizes on laptops computer (I am talking about late 90's, early 2000 year)
What ever computer you had, he had better (some times true*)
Dual Xeon System for home computer (this turned out true)

There was some stuff that he would crap on about and you knew that he was full of it. There was other times that he was telling us some stuff that was true.

Over the years, he did cut down on the BS and he finally realised that he was not impressing any one with his lies and exaggerations

* However the number of times he would go out of his way to quickly outspecs his peers when some one did have some thing better. He still sort of does that today.
 
Your friend seems a bit weird.
From what you've told me, he wanted you to build his system. Then all you did was give him advice on what to stick in there. He decided not to take your advice.
So then he picks out his own gear for the rig, but has his friend Aeron put it together for him. Then he doesn't remember what parts he put in there, and furthermore requires your help to make the OS/software run faster.

no.. He has no idea how to build a computer... He wanted me to build one for him, but decided to go with his other buddy that lives in town. (I live across the country)..

Keep in mind he has NO idea what he is doing.. Then he said he picked out the parts................... Wriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.............

Than I grilled him on the parts and he didn't know; hence, he didn't have anything to do with the build.. Except he paid for it.. that was it.
 
What buggs me is is people who equate cost to longevity, you may have spent £2000 on your desktop 10 years go that's no reason to think that it is still a decent computer, same goes for cost - suitability. I can sell you a dog turd for a million but its still a dog turd.

Dude, so are you telling me that my 386 33mhz machine with 4mb of memory and 20mb hard drive that my parents bought in 1991 isnt any good anymore? BUT IT COST OVER 3000 DOLLARS! I just dont see why people are so afraid to admit they are ignorant about certain things.
Ignorance can be corrected, but you cant fix stupid.
 
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