Cascade Failure

Everyone always tells me that I should do PC troubleshooting on the side. That I could make a business of it. And actually, I could. So I volunteered to take my friends, friends computer which had been decimated with Spyware and give it a little look-see and fix it. And I did. It only took about 6 hours, (1 to fix it and 5 to remove about 300 pieces of spyware, including lop.com) but it was fixed. Then the next day while troubleshooting the CD rom and minding my own business it turned off. And. Would. Not. Reboot. Ok so maybe we weren’t minding our own business and just happened to uninstall the Primary IDE driver trying to force the system to give us an option to enable DMA.

The oddity was that it was displaying a multidisk partition error upon boot and would NOT boot into Windows. Not no way. Not no how. After Luckily, we were able to save all of her files to CD by removing said, hard drive and connecting it with our home system where I drug files over and then burned them to CD. Phew. But still unable to get Windows to boot and without a copy of XP home, which has got to be the most pain in the ass OS since Windows ME.
I even did what I always do in times of technical crisis. I called Sam. He made me feel much better and even offered to stop by after one of his 20 hour workdays and grab the system to check it out.

Jorma ended up getting the system to boot, by reinstalling the Intel drivers found on the hard drive to itself while it was slaved to my system.
This is the reason that I in fact can not start my own PC repair business. Cascade failure.
Cascade failure is one of Sam’s terms that I love. It means that one little thing is broken, and little by little the system gets chipped away. Until in the end, the system is toast. You know, you are suddenly fixing the CD rom and then the virus software fails, and then you can’t get on the internet, one of the fans goes and then the hard drive crashes. Like that.
The other reason is, if you fix something one time on someone’s system most, (but not all) feel as though you are then responsible for the system.
If you remove a virus for someone and then six months later their CD rom stops working… it’s somehow your fault. And if you are really lucky, they might even be bold enough to say something like, “Do you think it quit working because of the virus that you removed… you know… before?”. Now we techies know that this isn’t possible and but try to explain this to someone that doesn’t know that the hard drive from the RAM and you’ve got problems.
The problem is though, as a techie, you are torn. You don’t really want to fix the system… you know you aren’t really responsible, but you just can’t stop your self from asking… “Are you getting an error message?” and so it begins. This is what you should take from this ladies and gents. When you fix a computer. You own it. Love it, or just leave it alone.