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Getting Gouged by Geeks
dottyslashdottydot writes "CBC Marketplace recently ran a sting operation and discovered that most home computer repair technicians failed miserably at diagnosing a simple RAM failure. Many techs tried to sell unneccessary software or upgrades. (or even a new computer!) However, the worst offender was one guy who claimed that the hard drive had failed, and that the only remedy was to pay $2,000 to have a special facility with a clean room recover the data."
Right.
You mean you actually insinuate that you can guarantee, to any reasonable degree, that upon the completion of your "cleanup" by running your tools from the Windoze "safe mode" the thing does not remain brimming full of fancy rootkits, custom filesystems with whole armadas of trojans in "unused" clusters and the like?!
Oh there! Another MS Windows Quick Cleanup Guy! Watch him skip happily in the forest, free of all care, whistling a happy tune, while the rest of us are chewing our fingernails watching our packet-sniffers report 5 automated attacks every minute on our tripwired virtual machines running in chroots on read-only file systems ... Hey Quick Cleanup Guy! Watch for that falling tree! Ouch too late! That had to hurt! Oh well... There! Another Happy Go Lucky MS Windows Quick Cleanup Guy! This one is even more confident in the Super Safe Safety of the Safe Mode! Go Cleanup Guy! But watch for the ... never mind! Next!
I guess what they say is true: Ignorance is bliss! (although short lived one, your mileage might vary from short to shorter, dealer may and will sell for more, etc etc)