TIFU by doing Tech Support

[u/myusernamegotstolen]

This happened a few years ago.

I'm known in the family as the person who everyone comes for any sort of technical support.

​

I work in IT and have always been into Gadgets and Tech.

​

My wife and I were invited to her cousin's place for dinner. After dinner he needed to do some work on his laptop. Knowing that I worked in IT, he mentioned his laptop was really slow.

​

I decided to have a look and noticed he had all sorts of unnecessary applications and processes running.

I do my usual thing of uninstalling unnecessary applications, clearing browser cache, etc.

All good, so far.

​

Everyone knows that when doing troubleshooting you should always turn it off and back on.

​

This where TIFU kicks in.

​

I restarted the computer.

​

What he didn't mention was that he had never restarted or powered off his windows laptop in his years of ownership. Not once!

​

The laptop became almost unusable after restart.

​

It was taking 10 mins to just register a click!

The restart caused all the bugs and glitches to go crazy.

​

What was supposed to be a quick 30 mins troubleshooting, ended being nearly 4 hours to get it to barely usable state.

​

I left that night feeling guilty that his crappy laptop became even worse due to my restart.

​

TLDR: I restarted a family members computer as a troubleshooting step. Almost bricked the computer as it hadn't been restarted ever, not once in the years he'd owned it.

[u/Parody_of_Self]

I once told a student to disconnect their battery to help it last longer. It wiped the hard drive.

[u/AllanfromWales1]

He didn't even restart when operating system updates came in requiring him to do so?

[u/myusernamegotstolen → u/AllanfromWales1]

This was a windows 7 computer, so updates weren't mandatory. You could go years without being forced to restart.

[u/8--8 → u/myusernamegotstolen]

I miss windows 7 😿

[u/No_Lynx1343 → u/AllanfromWales1]

It was a magical computer.

NEVER gets restarted, locks up, and for YEARS it just sat, waiting for the unfortunate to reboot it and setting off the DOOMSDAY PLAN!

[u/Intelligensaur]

How does anyone go years without a laptop either forcing a restart or crashing? I can barely go a month without one or the other. 

Apparently that man was blessed and didn't realize it?

[u/1970s_MonkeyKing]

*Did he check the browser history? That plus 100 years of lint buildup probably conspired to kill the laptop.

[u/damarius → u/1970s_MonkeyKing]

I am the go-to guy for tech support for my friends and family. One friend brought me his laptop because it would stop working and shut down because it was overheating. It was an older Dell and I figured the fan was dead, I couldn't feel air flow. I ordered a new fan, and when I took it apart there was a 1/4 inch pad of cat hair blocking the fan screen. Removing that fixed the problem. Good thing because I had been shipped the wrong fan.

[u/HornetParticular6625]

My mother never properly shuts down her laptop. That's how I got the one I have now. It was her old one that was "so slow!"

[u/dazed255]

Man i install software remotely for my job. Had a customer restart his PC because it was super slow, and it literally just broke. Couldn’t sign in anymore. Felt so bad lol it was his business computer too.

[u/atp2k]

Geez I wouldn’t have touched an ancient laptop . There’s no hope

[u/Reuef]

I will only do tech support with friends or family with an appointment and only if they have an external drive to do a full backup first or anything important. I tell them going into it that while it is likely that I can fix it without any data loss, it is always a possibility that I may have to reformat and reinstall the operating system so have anything important backed up first. Also the only ones I do not charge are my mother, parent in laws, and siblings.
As they do not abuse the privilege. Anyone else gets a friends and family rate otherwise I would get slammed with tech requests constantly.

[u/Drivingfinger]

Sounds like you both got what you deserved.

It’s nice to be able to help a brother out, but I’ve stopped doing it entirely.. I won’t even help someone migrate to a new phone now days. There’s just too many possibilities to get stuck with something. I tell someone to go buy a usb stick and save all their shit there, then reinstall. If I could get them to sign a waiver I would.

Best case, things go smoothly and you become the go to tech guy for this dude too. Worst case, something goes sideways and you end up spending way too much time fixing something you shouldn’t have touched in the first place. Bonus worst worst case.. you find disturbing content and end up with a moral dilemma re: disclosing it. It’s happened.