Just as a heads up, you can pretty safely save ‘important’ data if you follow the right procedure.

I put the data on an external drive, fire up a virtual machine, mount the drive directly to the virtual machine to contain it. Run a mixture of Maleware Bytes, Avast, and Kaspersky on it one at a time and take care of any…

I can’t tell you how many times I have had someone bring me a computer that was supposedly ‘fixed’ by another service. Staples is the most popular around here cause it’s about the only thing close.

Thorough and honest are big deals to people and they seem to really appreciate it. I definitely don’t do it for a living,…

Everyone I do work for signs a waiver stating that they understand the risks including accidental and intentional file loss. While that isn’t bulletproof in court, it’ll hold up pretty damn well.

Yeah I honestly haven’t checked the rates around here in quite a while. There used to be some guy that had a small shop in our town square that advertised all over the place with stupid low prices (he did some of the shittiest work, I can’t tell you how many systems I have seen screwed up by him) and that’s why I have…

Eh right now I’m young (23), so it isn’t like I have a wife or kids I need to devote time to. And 90% of the stuff that comes in is simple enough that I can just run Tron on it, and be good.

Yes and no. She gets the extra option of paying me in food. But in all reality, I very rarely have to do stuff for my parents. My dad knows enough to be relatively competent with computers and fix many of his own issues. While he was a mechanic by trade (on natural gas compressors) he was kind of a jack of all trades…

I’ve been thinking of upping it for a little while, probably will soon. But I only ever charge for time in front of the computer. If I start a scan, I let it run and go about my day and just come back to it 10 hours later after it has found a bunch of stuff and tell it what to do with it. I am never going to sit in…

That’s just flat out entitlement bull crap, and if anyone ever came to me and demanded I work on their computer on company time, I would show them my employment contract and tell them tough luck, take it to geek squad.

That being said, I have had my CEO (medium sized financial firm, mostly corporate tax and govt. audit…

Yeah I work for IT in a single company so it’s a little different for me. We normally keep pretty busy so I just tell people company time is not an option and bill them for it outside of that. Even still though, people appreciate it, and I charge far less than the more amateur services at staples or best buy. Even…

Back when I was working in IT, I’d get requests almost every week from a co-worker or my bosses to work on their personal technology—and sometimes even fix their friends’ or family members’ laptops or phones. Sometimes promises of a pizza or a small payment would be suggested, but even then it seemed inappropriate.…

What phone do you have? Google’s voice to text is pretty damn good. I mean it still has errors, but it is pretty rare unless you have very loud background noise or a low end phone with a junk mic in it.

As someone who works in IT and has to support the other employees, I totally concur. I am sure the few times I have to call tech support they probably love me because I can say ‘this is the problem, these are the steps which reproduce the problem, here is pertinent information about my operating environment, the…

Definitely agree with everything you said here! I work in IT and we have software that lets us control any computer in our 12 offices, but requires some odd log in credentials in about 5 different text boxes. I press on button on my keyboard, and it’s all done. Plus a ton of other smaller things.

As a fun note, I am…

Awesome. Thank you for teaching me something today.

Did anyone else think that this was going to be a Torch article before they looked at the author? I sure did. Sorry Patrick.

Can I be ungreyed yet?

Is this true or are you just pulling peoples legs? I feel like it is, but at the same time, I almost feel like that is to simplistic to be it haha.

It is important to make the distinction of winter tires though.

2WD with winter tires is still better than AWD with all-season or summer tires, which in the US is sadly how most people drive.

I am an average middle class 23 year old that is just a year out of college, and every single pair of pants that I own I have had tailored.

I am short (5’4”ish) and kind of chubby and I am basically all torso, very short legs. I have never once found a pair of pants that fit me properly, anything that fits at the waist…

Same problem here, it doesn’t help that I am kind of chubby. It’s nearly impossible to find pants that fit correctly, so I just buy something close and get them tailored.

Yeah my old phone is just right on that cusp where things started to move differently. I have a Samsung GS4 and can’t wait to upgrade because of the issues it’s had and some of the ones that are slowly developing for my phone.