New Customer

Just as I was sitting down to watch some fine TV viewing tonight with 'Prison Break', '24' and 'Heros' the phone rings. The caller was having some computer problems and wanted to know if I could help. As she sounded a bit frantic I sensed that she wanted some immediate help. So I said I could be right over.

I was over at the residence in a minute or so and found the problem appeared to be with the printer. It had been working fine, however, it just stopped working with this particular program. I went to the manufacturer's web site and downloaded the correct printer driver and did an uninstall and reinstall of the printer driver.

The driver went in fine and all programs were working fine except the program that was needed to print a report. I felt that it could be the actual program that got a glitch and needed to be reinstalled. Of course nowadays most computers come pre-installed with all the programs they need. The backups are on a 'Restore' disk which is a pain in the butt to use to reinstall just a single program.

I was fortunate in that I had the program at home on a separate disk. I drove home and got the disk, returned and reinstalled the program. All was well once again with the program and the printer. However, while I was doing the printing I noticed there were some errors in the report. The report was created by using a spreadsheet and there were errors being shown where the equations were not working properly.

With a bit of searching I got the errors fixed up, but then found some more errors. It looked like every line of the report would have to be gone through with a fine tooth comb. Sadly the owner was not a spread sheet expert, but at least she had the report all printed out. She could go through it and see if she could fix up the errors on paper.

While I was working I was speaking to the folks about slowness of their computer and how they should be maybe looking at some anti-spyware software, etc. Then I asked if they had cleaned out the junk (extra files) out of the computer lately. Well yes, they had the computer in to get cleaned only a year or so ago. I then quickly downloaded Crap Cleaner and did quick check. The computer only had 670 megs of junk sitting there so we cleaned that up for them and recovered the real estate on the hard drive.

I then re-explained about spyware and whatnot that they should be looking at. I could tell that we were overshooting the knowledge base on this one. So I asked if they would rather have me do the installing and cleaning. This was definitely a better plan than them doing it themselves. So now I have a date to go work on their computer on Wednesday.

Gee, word of mouth in a small town is great :)