Pulling my hair out over this PC!
adarryl
No Man Stands So Tall As When He Stoops To Help a Child. Icrontian
I need some opinions and troubleshooting advice on a system I built several years ago for a coworker as a favor (no fee). I apologize for the length of this post up front, but the situation is rather complex and I am not sure where the problem lies so here goes:
This is an Intel E8400 system on a Gigabyte GA-EG31M-S2 with a 250Gb Seagate SATA HD, 2Gb DDR2 and Win XP Home. The latest complaint is "something wrong with it, not booting properly" with blue screens. Here is what I have found so far:
On the first cold boot in my hands, checkdisk kicks in saying the volume needs to be checked for consistency. Several entries then appear stating, "Deleting corrupt attribute record (128, " ") from file record segment 45945" etc. After this process completes, the system boots to desktop and appears to function normally with the exception of a nag screen pop-up saying, "You have files waiting to be written to CD" (2.1Gb worth to be exact). (I cancelled this action and deleted the temp files) There was also a nag screen from AVG Internet Security Trial Edition asking which of 3 networks it should connect to: 2 wireless networks and one hard wired. (I don't know where the wireless networks are coming from as this is a desktop PC with no add-in wireless card. The owner's home network is Hughes Net hard wired. I uninstalled AVG trial edition and put back AVG Free which is what was on it originally. After dealing with these nag screen issues, the system boots normally with no more checkdisk scan prompts.
Memtest 86+ comes back clean, Eset on-line scanner comes back clean, Seatools Short and Long tests come back without errors.
Now if you are still reading, here is where it gets interesting as well as frustrating. The owner of this PC has had her 20 something daughter move back in with her and this is when all these problems began to appear. I know her daughter well and she is reckless with a computer (as she is with most things). She will add or install, change, delete, download anything without giving it any thought. When the PC acts up and she is asked what happened, her response is always, "I didn't do anything, I was just (typing, emailing, websurfing etc.) and that screen popped up" or "it quit working." (Face palm)
Here is where I need your input. To me, this is user error not a hardware issue, but does anyone think otherwise? If so, what troubleshooting suggestions do you have? My efforts to help in this matter are once again, free of charge. So is this a hardware failure I am missing? I suspect her daughter (now living in her mother's finished basement) has tried to jump her own PC into her mother's wired network through a wireless router thus the wireless network prompt from AVG. (But I have no proof) Problem is, the daughter gets on her mother's PC when she is at work so you never know what she has done without supervision. I am getting so tired of getting calls about this PC! I could scream! Take pity on me here and offer your thoughts. THX.
This is an Intel E8400 system on a Gigabyte GA-EG31M-S2 with a 250Gb Seagate SATA HD, 2Gb DDR2 and Win XP Home. The latest complaint is "something wrong with it, not booting properly" with blue screens. Here is what I have found so far:
On the first cold boot in my hands, checkdisk kicks in saying the volume needs to be checked for consistency. Several entries then appear stating, "Deleting corrupt attribute record (128, " ") from file record segment 45945" etc. After this process completes, the system boots to desktop and appears to function normally with the exception of a nag screen pop-up saying, "You have files waiting to be written to CD" (2.1Gb worth to be exact). (I cancelled this action and deleted the temp files) There was also a nag screen from AVG Internet Security Trial Edition asking which of 3 networks it should connect to: 2 wireless networks and one hard wired. (I don't know where the wireless networks are coming from as this is a desktop PC with no add-in wireless card. The owner's home network is Hughes Net hard wired. I uninstalled AVG trial edition and put back AVG Free which is what was on it originally. After dealing with these nag screen issues, the system boots normally with no more checkdisk scan prompts.
Memtest 86+ comes back clean, Eset on-line scanner comes back clean, Seatools Short and Long tests come back without errors.
Now if you are still reading, here is where it gets interesting as well as frustrating. The owner of this PC has had her 20 something daughter move back in with her and this is when all these problems began to appear. I know her daughter well and she is reckless with a computer (as she is with most things). She will add or install, change, delete, download anything without giving it any thought. When the PC acts up and she is asked what happened, her response is always, "I didn't do anything, I was just (typing, emailing, websurfing etc.) and that screen popped up" or "it quit working." (Face palm)
Here is where I need your input. To me, this is user error not a hardware issue, but does anyone think otherwise? If so, what troubleshooting suggestions do you have? My efforts to help in this matter are once again, free of charge. So is this a hardware failure I am missing? I suspect her daughter (now living in her mother's finished basement) has tried to jump her own PC into her mother's wired network through a wireless router thus the wireless network prompt from AVG. (But I have no proof) Problem is, the daughter gets on her mother's PC when she is at work so you never know what she has done without supervision. I am getting so tired of getting calls about this PC! I could scream! Take pity on me here and offer your thoughts. THX.
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Comments
Whether it is XP or Win 7 I would make sure mom had a locked admin acct and the daughter was on a guest account with NO ACCESS.
I talked with the owner about options but she does not want to make any changes at this time. (I guess she would rather repair the PC every other week than to try to keep it secure in the first place.) So she tells me she will come by my place and pick up the PC. The next day the door bell rings and who is there to get the PC?! Her daughter!!!!! She says mom couldn't get away and asked her to pick it up. So I hand over the tower knowing it'll be coming back to me shortly. (sigh) I may have to make my services so expensive they will just go away. (face palm)
I've never known a checkdisk to come up *without* someone dicking around with the machine severely.
@shwaip has it right, but I would add this:
Put the daughter on a separate user account and reduce her user privs. Make sure she cannot change System/OS files, or install a program for all users- just her own account. Put the daughter in as much of a sandbox as the mother will tolerate. Password the Admin account for the mother.
Windows 7 makes this stuff super easy, and it's never blue screened once for me yet. Also, Microsoft Security Essentials is a very respectable AV for being free.
Best of luck.
Yeah, unfortunately, the mother is making you an enabler for PC abuse. You may have to continually up the price.
NOW, it DOES sound like the mother is very busy and that may be part of the problem- she may feel as though she cannot adapt to any changes. Many people cannot cope with changes in their PC layout; they feel like there's nothing to be gained and they find it disorienting. Maybe you can reinforce that the only thing which will change for the mother will be a password, and she can write that down in her daytimer or something. These changes won't impact her. She won't lose things, you're not going to move things around on her, etc. She may just need reassured.
@adarryl - I think we are similar, I have the same problems, customers of mine mess stuff up constantly and if I built it I kind take it on myself that I did not make it bulletproof for them, but it's not really fair to expect that of ourselves. I fix crap pro bono all the time because I hate to say no, but I'm learning, sometimes you just have to.
I'm just going to echo schwap and straight man, after running the basic hardware diagnostics in DOS, if everything looks kosher, only offer to backup their files and format for them don't torture yourself in troubleshooting, just format and be done with it. Be direct, you love them, but it's the last service you can offer without charge. If your kid breaks it, that's okay, I charge $30 an hour, $25 for friends. They won't be more careful, they will still need you, just next time you will feel okay about getting paid.
Don't feel guilty about charging them, you should feel guilty about not charging them.
I've had to fix my home PC enough due to siblings that I actually placed all of them on limited accounts, the only ones having admin access being my father and myself because it's broken down (literally) 15 times in the past year and a half.
It's running XP as a home computer and is undoubtedly going to be messed up again very soon, lol Kazaa.
If it's an ok computer, maybe offer to buy it cheap so they can buy a new computer so you have another spare for whatever you need.
As for having her buy a second computer, good thought, but she already asked me if I had any PC's available for sale for that purpose. I do. In fact, I have 3 desktop PC's I built that I could easily sell: one AMD Phenom II 720, one AMD X4 955 and one Intel C2Quad Q6700. The latter two are Win 7 machines. However, I declined to sell any of those to her for the same reason I declined to build her daughter a new PC. I just don't need the headache of continual service calls due to her mischief. The problem is, my friend trusts me and would rather buy from me (probably because my after care is TOO convenient). I tried to steer her to Walmart to pick up an Acer with Win7 as a secondary PC; she wasn't interested. I feel like I am on a short rope here. LOL!
It might not be something she'll ask for, but might be thankful for if you do.