Re:Fixing Macs door to door
by Nextgrid on Saturday January 06, 2024 @06:25PM
(#38896649)
Had a similar experience. Long ago when I was younger and poorer I offered IT support on my country's equivalent of Craigslist.
Fairly well-off elderly chap wanted me to fix his laptop - was an underpowered machine that somehow got Vista installed on it (but no graphics drivers, so everything was in 640x480) so was unusably slow.
Now the proper answer to that would be to just tell him to buy a new computer, but I didn't want to let him down so I figured this machine might be salvageable with a lightweight Linux distro.
Couple months pass by and then I get a call. He's asking why videos aren't working. I ask him what website it was - "double-you double-you double-you... dot... x... hamster... dot com".
Now I didn't particularly care about his extracurricular activities, got him to curl|bash a script I wrote on the spot to get SSH access and installed the Flash player I forgot and sent him on his way. I was surprised he'd just openly admit to it though.
Fairly well-off elderly chap wanted me to fix his laptop - was an underpowered machine that somehow got Vista installed on it (but no graphics drivers, so everything was in 640x480) so was unusably slow.
Now the proper answer to that would be to just tell him to buy a new computer, but I didn't want to let him down so I figured this machine might be salvageable with a lightweight Linux distro.
Couple months pass by and then I get a call. He's asking why videos aren't working. I ask him what website it was - "double-you double-you double-you... dot... x... hamster... dot com".
Now I didn't particularly care about his extracurricular activities, got him to curl|bash a script I wrote on the spot to get SSH access and installed the Flash player I forgot and sent him on his way. I was surprised he'd just openly admit to it though.