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Wasting Time Fixing Computers
An anonymous reader writes "Interesting experiment by Marshall Brain, where he tracked every time-wasting error, repair, annoyance on his home network for one month. He logs 11 hours and 20 minutes of crap, everything from driver problems to forced upgrades, spam overflows... you name it. Anyone on /. is experiencing the same thing. Is it going to get better or worse in 2004, and how much time are we all wasting?"
With a Dell last Christmas....she called and went through the support desk script and it was determined that she had a software driver issue. They would send out a new driver (since she couldn't access the internet...it was a modem driver). 1 month later and over 40 hrs logged on hold and tech support, she finally went to a friends house, downloaded the driver to a floppy, installed it and it still didn't work. Called Dell and they finally send a tech to replace the modem.
I can beleive it, I've seen it.
WTF? Over?
If he only found 11 hours of stuff to fix, he obviously isn't utilizin his full imagination.
I suggest overclocking, attempting to run a computer submerged in pure water(maybe those two at the same time), or extending the range of a wireless network with items purchased at a hardware store.
because many computer users i know simply don't care the least about keeping their machine clean. Why use another browser than IE which their so used to (they had a crash course of course). Outlook and word is all they use (perhaps even acrobat reader) and preferably as little as possible.
I've spent countless hours removing blaster and the likes, removing spyware and viruses and trying people to get to use Moz Firebird or Opera.
Of course, a month later they call me again with *exactly* the same problems.
Alas for most people a computer is like a coffee machine it just has to fullfill its purpose. Companies can release all the fixes they want, it won't make a difference for a large part. My father for example has this Dell Laptop 2.4ghz P4 cpu. Runs on win98 (!) and office97 (no updates of course) because there's no money for upgrades or m$'s stupid licensing. The IT staff at his place doesnt have a clue bout spyware and the likes ('but we have a firewall') or vulnerabilities and i guess they wont ever care in this life.
It's only gonna get messier i'm afraid.
Thanks to Microsoft for exercising their right to innovate browsing
Reading through this article I noticed that a lot of his time was spent on problems specific to windows (pop-up, virus, etc). I've been using Linux on my home computer since '95 and I probably still spend a comparable amount of time on computer related maintenance. Thankfully, it's not system crashes but chasing down the occasional weirdness with hardware compatability or situations where an application's features are not 100% functional. At least with free software I don't pay for bug fixes (generally) but there are still problems and the 100% functionality can be very irritating.
I found it interesting that he noted the absurdity of having to "agree" with so many legal documents just to maintain the system.
I probably spend a comparable amount of time myself.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
About 10 years ago I had both the interest and skills to build a Linux installation from scratch. I built Alphas, Suns and piles of single- and multi CPU PCs just to experiment with them and then sell them off.
Now I'm too old. I get irritated by the glitches and bugs. These days I get annoyed even with kitchen-and-sink Linux distributions like Mandrake. Sure it installs cleanly and looks smooth but I still have to fiddle with it to get Flash or Real work with Mozilla and so on.
I just want things to work.
My next computer will be a Mac.
The owls are not what they seem
My dad the welder taught me not to let family take advantage. If you do something for a living it means you bill for your time. You might have a 'family rate' but you still bill. He does make exceptions but in general he has a an hourly rate he charges for welding. He has also paid me for any tech work I've done for him.
The amount of actual work that gets done on computers is vanishingly small. I would guess the ratio of productive work units of time compared to [reboot/reinstall/reconfigure/restart/find/lose/fi nd again/corrupted file/driver missing/hardware failure/wrong version/broken fonts/where's the
install instructions] units of time is perhaps 1:100 and that's being very, very liberal.
Problem ONE with computers is the total lack of adequate backups. Yeah yeah Norton Ghost and tar and yeah yeah yeah. Back up a 120GB hard drive with Ghost and a CD-R. My ass.
Then try to restore it. BWAAHHAHAHAAAAA!!!
And yeah, I use Linux too. It installs great, and it runs great and then you start configuring things, and about 47 weeks later, you have lost all interest in working on anything.
Every time I'm walking through the computer store looking for some obscure item absolutely necessary to make yet another attempt to get some fucking work done I walk by them Mac G5s...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I read about his experiment yesterday and I could not agree more. I got two very different extremes of his concern:
1. I am a Mac switcher. A little bit after I switched to Mac I noticed that, once the euphoria of the new computer wore off a little bit, and OS X stopped being a novelty to me, I was running out of things to do in the computer. I thought I was hallucinating, because as far as I could tell, and this includes many years messing with every flavor of Windows plus SuSe and freeBSD, I seemed to be spending at least one hour less per day in front of the computer. Then I figured it out: I was too used to spend about one hour a day just doing things to keep the PC running.
The Mac was pretty much maintenance free and updates don't come out every day, so unless you are a tweaker, there is not a lot of stuff to do to mess with the OS itself. Most apps I use check for an update on startup, and on my daily list of websites to visit is versiontracker, which will tell me any other of my apps that needs to be updated.
2. At work I wear many hats: I am the lead programmer, but at a moment's notice I have to switch gears and become the CIO/CTO/Director of Technology/Mac guy/Windows server Guy/Network Guy/Printer Guy, etc. I work for a 14-employee company, and I am the only technically-oriented person (everybody else is either a biologist or a statistician). I kept having trouble because even if I only spend about 50% of my week working on programming tasks, I was always working 60 hours weeks because of all the odd jobs that had to be done around the office. Worse, there was no way to track these, so my timesheets for a week would show 20-30 hours broken down between a few billable projects, then another 20-30 hours clumped as "IT."
I started using Issue Tracker (issue-tracker.sourceforge.net) and forced myself to write a trouble ticket for every stupid little request I was made. It did not matter if it was a 5-minute job: if it was not a "billable" task, it would go into the issue tracker. After a couple weeks, I got to the same conclusion as Marshall. All these little jobs suck in a hell of a lot of time. The 5-minute printer clearing job is actually a 15-minute job: 5 minutes for somebody to come to you to interrupt what you are doing, explaining the problem, then 5 minutes to fix and test and a final 5 minutes to explain the problem was fixed and to return to work.
The worst thing was that the boss acutally had the nerve to tell me that the reason I was working 12-hour days was because I was goofing off 8 hours at the office and then catching up from home. Now I can show him the issue tracker log and show him that no, even with 14 Macs at the office there is just too much crap that has to be dealt with thru the day.
The Macs at the office run fine, thank you. Even the ones still on OS 9 (*cough*cheapskate boss*cough*). Most problems we have with the Macs are due to programs we run in classic mode (have I hinted at how cheap my boss is?\): once these lock up there is no way to kill just one classic app without restarting the classic mode itself. The two Windows servers are cheap and sturdy but require constant TLC. Thanks God the mail server is freeBSD.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
The other way to look at this is: "Gee, a free PC arrived in the mail! I've always wanted an extra server box." Soon, requests for your time will disappear.
"Sometimes I have even been known to forget about several systems because they just work."
:o)
While doing some recabling at a law firm I found a 486 server (running) in the back of a cuboard. No one knew what it was for. It was running some crypticly named binaries but wasn't seeing that much network traffic.
So, we shut it down it, and all at once their fancy account system (apparently running on a dual xeon windows 2000 server) died. Turns out this machine had been handling the business logic for years and the last lot of cowb^H^Hnsultants had just thrown on a new front end and database without mentioning they didn't bother to rewrite or port the app.
As far as I know, it's still running well, with no plans to upgrade it... and I'm sure that with time they will forget about it again
Beep beep.
Maybe you should examine your priorities in life. If you are judging family and friends beneath the time spent on your job/hobbies, something is out of whack.
My parents live on the opposite coast, but whenever I go visit I plan to spend at least 3-4 hours cleaning and fixing their computer. It is unreasonable to expect them to learn how to fix some of the things that can occur, and even though it's "a waste of time" I'm happy to do it for them, and they are grateful.
I have a dear friend I built a computer for, and when it was not running as smoothly as planned, I took a few 3.5 hour train trips to spend part of my weekend getting it right, even though I also knew that part of the bargain was me taking her out to dinner. And No, sex wasn't involved. It's just something you do for your friends. Do I do it for all of them? Of course not - but to suggest that helping your family and friends is a waste of time reveals a completely skewed sense of what life is about.
I suspect the reason for that is twofold:
1) they're used to paying people to do that sort of thing, as it's been that way their whole lives
2) those things clearly take effort, whereas most PC problems are fixed sitting down
Given enough time, I think people will come to realise that actually, PC repair does take effort (mental, rather than physical), and that people do get paid to do it professionally.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
They ALL have Windows problems. 50 - 60% of the girls just don't want to see you again.
I do tech support for my extended family as well. Most of them (cousins, in-laws, friends of family, etc) offer to pay me when I spend some time fixing them up. I almost always refuse, but the fact that they recognize the value of my services is appreciated.
As for immediate family... parents, brother... nah, they get free tech support. Part of the reason I'm So Darn Smart is that my parents brought me up that way, and bought encyclopedias when I was young, and helped me with my homework and drove me to computer club and helped pay for college and and and and and and and....
I figure I could do 2 hours of tech support every day for the rest of my life and still not pay them back.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
I've had two really bad experiences.
1. My ex's father replaced the gas tank on my car, I paid for the tank and paid him for doing the work. He own's a fully equipped professional garage so it didn't take long at all, about 40 minutes. Later, when he had a hard disk failure, at his garage business, I was called in to rescue any data and help install a new hard drive about 10 minutes for the disk, but hours rescuing the data. Needless to say he paid for the hard disk and then gave me a big thank you and thought it was even. No attempt at giving me any money, and he felt quite offended when I tried to hit him up for money. After that, his computer problems were just that, his problem.
2. About 7 years ago when scanners and color printers were not as widespread as they are today, I did some photograph restoration work for a friend of mine. Lot's of touch up work on the aged photos and printing out on, expensive at the time, photo paper. I had about 20 hours of work and about $20 in paper plus whatever ink that it used. He also tried the give me a, "Hey, thanks man!" kind of payment. But he owned a bar where I was a regular at. 3 weeks later, my companies payroll didn't come in on time, and I was planning on going out that night. I went to his bar, asked to run a tab, and he looked at me as if I had just shit on his floor. He claimed he didn't know me well enough, even though we had drank together several times, been over to his house, been to concerts, and restored his pictures for free.
Just because I like computers, doesn't mean I do it for free!
My next Slashdot post will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
- they must agree to never disable the Virus Scanner and Firewall
- they must agree to never install games from a cereal box
- they must agree to use Mozilla for web and mail..or Firebird\Thunderbird. (same stuff)
- they must admit that their computer is having problems and they need help.
- they must be open to understanding the importance of updates and the dangers of p2p programs that install spyware.
- they must bring me their computer if they want it fixed. I just can't do it at their places as they are not setup for effective troubleshooting. (incredible how many people that eliminates...can't even be bothered to bring it to you...they want you there)
- they must take an interest in maintaining the health of their system.