At work, when the (college) student workers cannot resolve an issue, I’m the last stop in our support line. As a result, I sometimes get computers for which there is nothing we can do about it. For example, I had two Acer desktops a couple weeks ago, nearly the same model, crash and these came into the office. Everything I tried didn’t get the computers working, but part of that is due to the fact that the CDs provided consistently encountered errors; all other hardware appeared to function correctly. I had to tell the students that the computers needed more work than we could do, and fortunately, one of the computers was still under warranty. Today I had a student pick up another laptop which had, from what I could tell, a dead hard drive, as a spare hard drive was detected by the system in BIOS, whereas the original was not.
That’s one of the most frustrating things I have to deal with when working on someone else’s computer: having to be right about what I’m telling them. I mean, I don’t have to be right, but I don’t feel right telling them something that might be false. It’s part of the reason that fixing a computer with an issue, or even correctly diagnosing the issue, is such an accomplishment; it gives me something to push off of. At least I’ll be 1-1 this week, as the second computer is working, and should be back with the student tomorrow.
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