Working For Nothing

I did manage to get both of the computers done up and returned to the owners. The one computer was easy as pie and I had it done in no time at all. The second one gave me all kinds of grief and I really never did get it to where I was happy.

I went through the darn thing with a fine toothed comb and know there were no nasties hidden away anywhere. It is just that it took so long to boot up. Once it was up and running it seemed to perform about as expected with a 2 gig CPU and 128 megs of RAM. It just took so long to boot. I checked and double checked for programs starting in the background as well as services that were started up on boot up. Nothing exciting whatsoever there. In fact it was a very slimmed down start menu.

I knew that the owner wanted the computer back for the holidays, so I worked on the darn thing as much as I could. I ran every cleaning, anti-spyware, etc program that I knew about and still no joy. This morning I did a final defrag and scan and packed up the computer and took it back to the owner. I explained that about the only thing I could think of was that it needed more RAM.

This fellow announced that he had the same computer at home and his was like lightening compared to this computer. When I queried him on the RAM he wasn't sure if they both had the same amount or not. I sure would be interested in finding out the comparisons as per RAM though. An extra 128 or 512 meg of RAM would most definitely help this computer out though. When it was new it had XP installed, but then SP1 and SP2 have been installed. Along with that all of the updates that Microsoft have put out lately and then top it off with Norton AntiVirus and you can appreciate the extra RAM would help.

I explained that I did as much as I could but I certainly wasn't happy with the outcome. Thinking back now, I probably sat in front of the darn computer for about 24 hours in total time running various programs and doing various scans. When the fellow asked what he owed me, I replied that $20.00 would be fine. That was mainly for doing an install of a firewall and configuring the antivirus, etc.

I guess I won't be getting rich working on computers at those rates though :( However, money is definitely not the reason why I do work on the computers. If the truth was known, I'd probably do it for nothing.

Maybe next time I'll do better.