'putertutor
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 75
- Location
- Montana
So I had a customer bring a laptop to me, standard set of complaints - it's running slow, videos won't play, games (not online) like solitaire, backgammon, etc have jerky, stuttered animation. No problem, I tell him to let me have a day to look it over and I'll let him know what needs to be done. He has expired a/v software, signs of several malware items, and somehow is running win 7 on 2gb of ram with (reportedly) no issues until this week. So I let him know, and he agrees to a cleaning, memory upgrade, and new paid a/v.
I get it all done and he comes to pick it up. I normally don't allow customers to my house, but he lives way the heck out in the middle of nowhere, and I have no problem not making that drive.
The next day I get a call, saying it isn't any better, all the same issues are present. At this point I start wondering about my testing after all was completed and privately acknowledge to myself that I may have rushed it a bit and missed something. He's coming into town on other business and will drop off the laptop. I don't find much, there is a piece of malware, but not much else. Tested it half a dozen times on all the software he most commonly uses, youtube, several shortcuts he has mentioned, and all the games he likes to play. All is good and he comes back to pick it up on his way back home.
Not an hour later he calls in, again with the same problems. Now I am certain the problem has to be in his house. I go over some troubleshooting with him on the phone and we discover that his bandwidth is just about 0 (like less than dial up). I tell him to restart the router and if that doesn't work then a call to his isp is needed. About 20 minutes later I get a call back that goes to voicemail. He says he's pretty upset that I am into him $XXX dollars and all he had to do was reset the router. He wants a refund for the labor at least. This conversation lasted almost an hour starting out with him upset, and escalating to the point of yelling (him, not me), before he calmed down a bit.
Ugh. I work it out with him - no refund and he's happy - but once again I find myself learning the lesson of the value of thorough questioning about the problems and thorough work every time. Had I done that I wouldn't have doubted my work on the machine in the first place and could have saved myself a fair bit of hassle.
I get it all done and he comes to pick it up. I normally don't allow customers to my house, but he lives way the heck out in the middle of nowhere, and I have no problem not making that drive.
The next day I get a call, saying it isn't any better, all the same issues are present. At this point I start wondering about my testing after all was completed and privately acknowledge to myself that I may have rushed it a bit and missed something. He's coming into town on other business and will drop off the laptop. I don't find much, there is a piece of malware, but not much else. Tested it half a dozen times on all the software he most commonly uses, youtube, several shortcuts he has mentioned, and all the games he likes to play. All is good and he comes back to pick it up on his way back home.
Not an hour later he calls in, again with the same problems. Now I am certain the problem has to be in his house. I go over some troubleshooting with him on the phone and we discover that his bandwidth is just about 0 (like less than dial up). I tell him to restart the router and if that doesn't work then a call to his isp is needed. About 20 minutes later I get a call back that goes to voicemail. He says he's pretty upset that I am into him $XXX dollars and all he had to do was reset the router. He wants a refund for the labor at least. This conversation lasted almost an hour starting out with him upset, and escalating to the point of yelling (him, not me), before he calmed down a bit.
Ugh. I work it out with him - no refund and he's happy - but once again I find myself learning the lesson of the value of thorough questioning about the problems and thorough work every time. Had I done that I wouldn't have doubted my work on the machine in the first place and could have saved myself a fair bit of hassle.
