May 20, 2008 by admin.

Every Word is true, believe it or not… This week’s prestigious ID10T Award goes to the woman I sold my old laptop to. Whenever I sell a piece of technology, because I am such a nice guy, I offer them the opportunity to call if they have any problems with it, in this case, an Acer 5100 Laptop computer. I also spend a great deal of time, especially in the case of computers, testing and setting up the system so I can ensure that the system works well and is setup the way they asked such as a certain OS, settings, and so fourth. The very day after she took ownership of the laptop she began calling me, swearing up and down that the system is just shutting down on its own claiming it overheating and she can’t get it to boot up. She is getting heated in our conversation saying I sold her a piece of crap and she wants her money back. I told her that the sale was final, she could not get her money back, but I would be happy to look at and fix the computer if necessary. 

So a few days and about 100 calls later, when I finally had the chance meet up with her to look at the laptop, within seconds, I solved every problem she complained about. Can you guess what they were?  She claimed the computer was shutting down on its own. This was simply the LCD screen turn off from inactivity. The computer was not shutting down; she was just too stupid to realize it. She also claimed that the computer would not boot up, that she would see a black screen with some text on it, and then freaked out because she didn’t know what it was she would immediately hold the power button to shut it back down. Well this was because she tried to watch a DVD movie and didn’t remove the disk before rebooting the computer. So naturally the computer always attempted to boot from CD. On the black screen, the text read, “Press any key to boot from CD…” Hmmm. Think that may have been a hint? 

Anyway it is because of the above, This woman is the winner of the ID10T Award this week.

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May 20, 2008 by admin.

Up until recently, I always considered myself a fairly patient person, but come last Sunday I realized just how impatient I can be when it comes to technology…My grandfather asked me, as everybody in my family does, to come by Sunday afternoon to give him a hand with his computer problems. My grandpa Gordon needed help with getting data off his old computer to transfer over to his new computer as he did not know how to do this.  I had no clue at the time just how much of a major pain this seemingly simple task would be.I grabbed my biggest memory drive (16GB) and headed over to my grandparents house at about 2:00pm Sunday afternoon. We had a quick visit with coffee and such before getting started. Then, there it was, a 1997 computer case looking paperweight, complete with the infamous “Blue Screen of Death”. I was speechless; I didn’t even know Compaq made paperweights…My first step was to get the computer booted into Windows without the “Blue Screen”. I figured since I could see caked on dusk all over it, that this was likely an overheating issue as well as the 11 year old antiquated computer parts. So I took the computer outside and spayed compressed air through it to clean it up a bit. In the process, I of course got dusk all over me and I couldn’t stop sneezing the rest of the day, good times. Once I got the paperweight as clean as I could with 2 cans of compressed air, I took it back into the house hooked it back up. I then placed a fan next to the computer to blow air through it while booting back into windows. 10 minutes later, the wonderful B.S.O.D. appears again. Lovely…Well needless to say, I made several more attempts trying numerous things to get this computer to boot long enough to retrieve the data. Nothing worked. So I decided to take his hard drive home, install it in my old paperweight to copy his data over. That was much easier. I asked my grandpa why he waited so long to get a new computer, he simply replied, “I didn’t think I needed one”. Next I had to setup his new computer.His new computer came with, yep, you guessed it,

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