I work in a small, independant computer shop,
and I always get a cold, numb feeling when someone returns to our shop with a PC that they've just bought and utter the words "It's not working, my friend, who's an IT expert, has set it up for me and I want a new one."

Now, I'm not in IT support, and I'm a long way from being an IT expert, although I'll quite happily roll up my sleeves and wade in to try to solve a problem for someone, but some of the lash ups I've seen come in through the door have been horrendous, from illegal copies of XP being installed on new PCs..."I didn't want Vista, everyone says it's shit", to badly installed Linux distros, which, strangely enough, don't have the drivers installed for most of the hardware on the computer.

When the inevitable response from us arrives, normally a format and reload, or a legal copy of Windows getting put on, the customer will throw their toys out of the pram in front of everybody, shouting that "My mate is an IT expert, he works for *insert name of any financial institution here*", well, it doesn't do anybody's view of IT support any good does it?

Although, if the truth was being told, their mate's closest brush with IT was installing a load of crapware on any machine that came their way. And people wonder why tech support has got such a bad name, this must be repeated in stores across the country every day, in full view of Joe Public, who likely never hear, or see the other side of the story...the support bods who are on call to help their clients 24/7, and who generally do a damn good job of it.

Sorry for lack of teh funneh, but this rant's been festering for a while, and I'm glad I've got it off my chest. Keep fighting the good fight!
length, about 3 1/2 years
( loonybean giving as good as he gets since, Sun 27 Sep 2009, 22:24, 6 replies)

I've reformatted mates pc's with pirate copies of XP before.
I've never had any complaints, 90% of the time they had an OEM licence but lost the discs, I found it quicker to just slap on an unattended install (with the latest service packs/recent hotfix's) then do a wga patch. It serves them right for fucking up their computers and not keeping the provided discs.
( Slippery Mick ‏, Sun 27 Sep 2009, 22:47, closed)

Amen to that.
It's not the pirated copies per se, it's the fact that most of them have been cracked, badly, thus leaving security loopholes the size of Paris Hilton's snatch, which cause us the most problems. Plus, being a m******ft partner, we're not allowed to fix a knackered pirated version of XP.
Plus, normally, it's Vista that has been removed, so their license doesn't cover XP, although their mates never tell them that...
( loonybean giving as good as he gets since, Sun 27 Sep 2009, 22:52, closed)

MS licenses permit downgrades
Got a Vista license? Then you're allowed to use the equivalent version of XP. However, I've never tried jumping through the hoops required to get a suitable "downgrade" key from Microsoft, so I've no idea how easy it all is in practice.
( flake has nothing against your right leg, Sun 27 Sep 2009, 23:10, closed)

To the best of my knowledge,
the only versions of Vista that offer downgrade rights are the OEM versions of Business and Ultimate, the home versions don't have any.
( loonybean giving as good as he gets since, Mon 28 Sep 2009, 10:41, closed)

VLKs


The vast majority of pirate XP installations use VLKs, and do not require any hackery to work. Of those that don't (usually Media Centre installs) the only cracking required is a dll hook to make activation think the machine is running in safe mode - updates can be acquired quite easily outside of MSUpdate (does the FF-oriented windizupdate still work?). The hook doesn't affect anything else, but does tend to get hit by any new AV programs which don't have it listed as an exception.

And in any event... I am the mate to which you refer. The amount of arguments I've had with shitty 'ma and pa' computer shops for selling substandard goods at grossly inflated prices really makes the mind boggle. I've watched them condemn perfectly good laptops for entirely fabricated, fallacious reasons, sell the unlucky punter an overpriced replacement, then reformat the old one and put it on the 'preowned' stand for sale. I'm not saying you do these things, but it's far from uncommon.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Mon 28 Sep 2009, 1:48, closed)

I like to think that we're one of the good guys,
on average we make about 5% on PC sales, and I would be extremely pissed off if I found one of my staff writing off a computer that was OK. We don't work on commission either, so that also eliminates (hopefully) the customer being oversold a replacement. It's also fairly common for us to do a FOC repair at the counter if it's something fairly simple, if the customer's nice to us, we'll bend over backwards to help them.
( loonybean giving as good as he gets since, Mon 28 Sep 2009, 10:57, closed)