This all I've been doing today, fixing computers. And it reminds me of when tech support was actually in my job title, as opposed to now where it's not. People see me fixing the machines, and then they naturally begin to bring me the problems they have with their home machines or friend's machines. And I struggle to help, because they don't seem to understand the nature of enterprise tech support.

In those days, as now, the solution was always amazingly easy. Diagnose problem into two categories: easily fixable and not to easily fixed. If it falls into the latter, and nearly everything does, then you whip out the one size fits all solution: format the hard drive and reinstall. Even the easily fixable stuff, you just lump into the format solution because formatting is still easier. And if you encounter a minor problem with formatting, order the hardware guys to replace parts, always the HD and maybe the system board or memory. Easy.

The diagnosing is hard, because you have to do all these things to convince the end user that there is no other solution, when there usually is. To be fair, the "other solution" usually requires days of intense work and creativity, and from a manhour/efficiency/CostBenefit point of view this is never a realistic solution unless it's really really important. And that's part of what makes the diagnosis hard, determining if the data is important enough to avoid the format c: route. Usualy it's not. But nobody wants to hear that, so you run a bunch of tests, hum and haw a little, make sure to document all the error messages, try a few quick workaround you know from the start will fail, and hopefully save some shred of data before giving the bad news.

This works well in an enterprise enviroment, where all the software is packaged into a neat little install and automatically downloaded off the network. This does not work well at all in a home enviroment, where the original software installers are always missing, and half the software is either bootleg or downloaded from unknown websites (I'm referring to legal shareware or freeware). The goal is completely different, which is to massage the computer back to running health. It's much more difficult, and time consuming.

It's why I can fix 3 machines in one day, and have hardware fixes for 2 more on Monday; and yet it'll take me 1 week to massage a home computer. So next time you think about asking me to fix your machine, remember, it's a lot harder then work. And unlike work, you're not paying me either.