I see that you thought you left open a range of possibilities when you said, “depending on what is wrong with it”. I agree with you to a certain extent, but also remember that you have to be utterly clear about these things, because people in general have both somewhat of a ’service-paranoia’ and they are complete laymen where it comes to computers. So it needs to be made very, very clear to them what the context is. You may have to give examples of what may happen and how much it may cost, from the lower to the higher end.

One thing is true, you should have ensured whether or not they had a Retail or OEM XP CD before continuing with anything. You should not have done any repairs until you knew that. Otherwise, it will just seem like you’re adding and adding costs, and the customer could not have gleaned that from you in any other way than you being fully aware of the situation, and they being fully aware of the possible outcomes for them and telling them. Things like operating system cd’s, licenses, need to be known from the beginning.

The 9-in-1 XP thing that someone talked about isn’t as great a ‘fix’ as maybe thought, because there are more issues regarding legality than just installing someone’s original license key unto a new XP install of another source than the customer’s cd. To think that you’re legal because you change the key to the customer’s original key does not make that XP legal. Sure, the XP core is basically the same, but what protects you and the customer from breaking legalities as enforced by Microsoft is not solved by changing to the customer’s key on an installation from any 9-in-1 disc. For all we know it may be virtually undetectable, but even post SP3 recently has been added the pirated copy message hotfix that will tell you (or worse, the customer) that their copy is probably not legal. That would be undesirable for sure, wouldn’t it? If anyone else has more actual experience with this, they may give some more information.

To be honest however, I can kind of see why the customer might be a bit upset after that took place. Put yourself in the perspective of taking your car into a mechanic for an oil change, and being told you have to get a new muffler, transmission fluid change, spark plugs, and it still sounds bad when you take it back from the garage… that drives me nuts.

I really think in this case Bryce, you may have made false promises to this customer, and obviously they were expecting something entirely different then the outcome.

I guess the only way to protect yourself in this case is to stress the other side of the coin, that is “I may be able to replace the keys offsite, however, the entire keyboard may need to be replaced as well.” or “Although a virus scan and tuneup should take care of the issue, serious problems may require a complete format and system reinstall..”

Of course, this kind of flip-flopping can make the technician look confused and unsure of his/her abilities as well.. It’s a fine line.