Its oh so quiet Shh Shh

[ConcinusMan]

Sorry, I edited my post. It dawned on me that possums are not native. It is legal to keep them as pets although I can't understand why anyone would want to keep a mangy giant rat as a pet.

Wrong time to be releasing them don't you think? Why the heck didn't he wait until after sundown.

[infernalis]

I know, but they are the type of people who are prepared to pay the price even if they knew.

I used to have lights and stuff, but you know what, If I can get on the web and do my thing, I could care less.

The real money is in data recovery anyways. Too many kids fresh out of school willing to load windows for next to nothing.

In fact, that seems to be the "popular fix" these days, just format it and reload.

a chimp can do that.

Now when a business loses all their accounting for the year and it's mid November, thats where the dough is.

I made some of my best money because a restaurant owner got into a fight with her daughter, and the daughter came in and erased the machine in the middle of the night.

[ConcinusMan]

I'd say that 90 percent of the walk-ins(and therefore the money we make) at the shop are people who desperately need to save their pictures and other personal files from an unbootable and/or virus stricken machine. It's kinda funny really because it's completely preventable. If your pictures are so dang precious, then why the heck do you only have one copy of them, crammed on some old hard drive in a well used computer that you also use to surf the web and download files. And all of this with no virus protection or out of date virus protection. That's just asking for it.

Well, good for us that people still do that. And Wayne, you would be surprised at how many people are willing to pay $99 for nothing more than writing zeros to the drive, repartitioning/reformatting and re installation of windows. We have 2 or 3 machines doing just that on any given day. I'm making money, but I sure as heck don't call it "work". Many of these people have their license key, but no disk and that is why they come to us and fork out 99 bucks. They're happy because they think that their only other alternative was to buy windows again.

I made some of my best money because a restaurant owner got into a fight with her daughter, and the daughter came in and erased the machine in the middle of the night.

If I was going to do that, I would have booted from CD and wrote zeros to the drive, at least twice. Muahahaha.

[infernalis]

Don't get me wrong, I take the money no matter how it comes in...

Myself, I have several TB of drives that I put my data on and leave them disconnected unless I want the data.

and as far as wiping out moms data, no big deal, even if she stole the whole tower... That restaurant is my number one client, I back up her stuff myself, and all I had to do was make sure the drive was clean (no hidden Trojans) and put the data back on from my copies.

About the only thing that needed some work was the wine list I had was out dated, she had one copy of the new wine list on paper, I spent two days re-typing it on MS publisher.. and at my hourly rate, I was giddy all the way to the bank.

I quit punching time cards over a decade ago, why should I do all the brain work and footwork to pad someone else's pockets?

[ConcinusMan]

I don't punch a card or follow a schedule either. If they get a little overwhelmed they call me, or I just drop in when I feel like it and stay and "work" if there's anything waiting to be started on. We have a form I fill out and check off for the work I did and that's how they pay me. You know how that goes, some days you can make a lot in a short time or some days I can hang out for many hours and not make much but what the heck. Sometimes I just attend to machines and they are basically doing all the work. Gives me plenty of time to come on the forum and annoy everyone. Probably won't be long and I'll be back to work in the juice plant and won't have much time for the computer shop. I just do that when I'm not working full time on the evaporators. To be honest, I used to spend just as much time tinkering with computers in my spare time before I started getting paid for it, and so I would probably still do it even if I wasn't getting paid.

[infernalis]

I started out similar, but the guy I sub contracted for went bankrupt.. so I just took over the customer base.

Then I dumped all the pain in the neck $20 per call folks. Hey at todays gas prices, they can go get a mouse or keyboard on their own, or pay up the hourly rate for me to deliver it.

working from home, I do not have the burden of a leased storefront, extra utilities and the city code officer bothering me.

They call, and I "geek squad" straight over to them.

Not that this is the place to discuss it, but the contents of other peoples hard drives can be entertaining and I can learn a lot about that person.. sometimes things I would rather not know.

[ConcinusMan]

Not that this is the place to discuss it, but the contents of other peoples hard drives can be entertaining and I can learn a lot about that person.. sometimes things I would rather not know.

Oh yeah, been there done that. Oh the stories...

I do have a lot those "there was this one time when I found.." stories.

[kibakiba]

That happened when I was trying to help my dad with a virus and slowness on his computer... I saw things I'd be happy to never see in my life... I might be a bit immature about it but I still want to go "EWWWWWW!!!!" over it.

[ConcinusMan]

Adult content isn't even a big deal. That is found on so many I can't even count. What I mean by 'it isn't a big deal', is that it is tame, common, and even "rated G" compared to some other things I've found.

[ConcinusMan]

Hey, you guys know how sometimes you'll get a popup ad, or you'll be viewing some other page that "magically" knows what state or even what city you're in? Well, they just go by IP address. Anyone can look up an IP to get an idea of where your computer is. Well, I just got a popup ad. Looks like I won an ipad, yippie! The thing is, stupid ad says I am a lucky California winner. Jeez. I double checked my current IP just to make sure and it's definitely not a CA IP. Somebody screwed up.

I guess I don't win an ipad afterall. Darn it.