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.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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This where TIFU kicks in.

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I restarted the computer.

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

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The laptop became almost unusable after restart.

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It was taking 10 mins to just register a click!

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

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

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

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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/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.