I usually don’t mind doing tech support for people. I know it is the first geek rule: don’t do free tech support, especially for family. Something about people expecting you to do tech support from then on for free. And if something doesn’t work/breaks in the future you are held responsible. For whatever it was that broke. Not always a place you want to put yourself into.
But I do it anyway. Usually it is stuff that isn’t so much of ‘help fix this major problem’ as much as it is ‘I don’t know how to do X’ questions. I don’t mind the latter; the former are the ones that come back to bite you. So I do my best to make sure my solutions are, indeed, the solution needed. I don’t want to fix a symptom if I can find the real problem.
Well, one of the distant (as in physical distant) relatives is having a computer problem that I’ve been trying to help them fix. Right now they are stuck with a dead hard drive. (some data might be retrievable; I hope the drive isn’t gone beyond all hope) I have a spare hard drive. Not that this spare is one that I would really like to give out; it has been sitting unused for a while now. Drives don’t always like to be left alone like that after being used for a while. Hence I am doing my best to test this drive for any problems. Right now I’m using programs from the disk manufacture to check the drive out. Please oh please pass the diagnostic!
I really don’t want to send a drive that is going to die soon if I can help it.
(and I really wish I could tell them to just go buy a cheap Dell; but they can’t do that right now. )