The Tech Support Guy

I am the tech support guy. I usually have a computer or two hanging around the house, needing repairs. These come from friends and associates. It's a challenge, which means I enjoy it.

My friend Farrell's mom's machine is on the floor next to me. Once a very pricey Fujitsu, this laptop is getting a little long in the tooth. It was gunked up with a little spyware and some tiny applets; only a problem in the aggregate.

There was one other problem. Ruth had somehow locked the computer with user name and password she didn't know!

If you have your PC password protected, I have bad news. With a quickly downloaded copy of the "Emergency Boot and Recovery Disk," I logged on and was in control of users and passwords in under five minutes!

I told the family the laptop would benefit from more memory... but it's at its design limit already.

It will work and do everything Ruth wants. It will do it more slowly than I'd like.

She would actually be the perfect candidate for Linux, though I haven't (and probably won't) mention it. It's a little less CPU intensive than Windows XP, meaning it will be faster, and it has all the applications she wants and uses.

Linux still scares most users who cling to the belief Microsoft is some sort of gold standard. Of course, to me Linux is worn as a geek merit badge.

One thing I did do was install logmein. Next time, the repair is done via remote control! There are now seven machines I can operate from home.