Man, it’s been a couple rough days on the computer repair front.

Today was some ram installation in the west village, and then an msblast casualty from Boerum Hill, the owner of which I convinced to bring in-store, instead of me traveling to him. I think we’re going to give up on service outside of Williamsburg; it’s just not worth it — too much time to travel, and no direct access to the supplies at the store.

Yesterday I spent about 7 hours on a compaq that had stopped accessing the internet. Damned if it didn’t escape every possible attempt I made at getting it back online, until finally I backed up and made way into a quick restore (using Compaq’s original disks to return the computer to it’s factory-new state) — which still didn’t work!

I tried reinstalling windows, clean installing, and finally the quick restore, and none of them were successful in restoring internet access. The odd thing about it all was that the machine was getting an IP address and all, but DNS wasn’t working or something. I read that the winsock dll can get corrupted, but even reinstalling that gave me no love.

I did explore SFC — system file checker, something I’ve never really used…and with good reason. People say, oh, don’t reinstall windows just use System file checker. But 7 hours later, if you’ure paying $65 an hour — you would have been better off just clean installing windows!

The biggest problem was that all the installs and system files seemed to be corrupt somehow. I had a late night flash that perhaps the disk surface had become damaged; after 7 hours though, it was too late to run scandisk at that point.

The upshot is that the owners of this computer — Chad and Marilynn — were super-cool, and I didn’t charge them for all the time spent. They looked on it as an opportunity, as opposed to a catastrophe (I love people like that!), ultimately deciding to buy a new computer. Marilynn said, “Maybe this is a sign! I should stop doing stupid marketing jobs and be an artist!”

If everyone could react so peacefully and enthusiastically to a) a computer that no longer works and b) having to shell out$1500 bucks to get back on track, the world would be a much more pleasant place, don’tcha think?