[Eug-lug] Making geeks look bad

[Garl Grigsby]

Alan wrote:
> On Mon, October 29, 2007 11:03 am, Mike Cherba wrote:
>   
>> This is sad, but true.
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxSr2W6YjGc
>>
>>     
>
> I like the "clean room" guy. That's some upsell right there!
>   
<begin rant>

Ok. I'm going to come in on the other side of this issue and say we 
don't have enough information to say if these 'techs' were good or bad. 
First, this 'piece' is a load of crap. I'm willing to bet I can create a 
video that would make the best tech in the world look like an idiot with 
enough edits, cuts, and leading questions.

For example, they never say how the memory is bad. If the memory chip is 
completely fried, then the computer would not boot so you have no chance 
to run something like memtest. I'm sure most techs don't carry a 
$3000-$4000 RAM tester [1] around so they couldn't know for sure unless 
he happens to have the exact stick of RAM her machine needs.  If the RAM 
is really bad, then the motherboard might not even beep. I've got a 
stick of SDRAM somewhere that does that. You power on the computer and 
the fans run for 1-2 seconds and it turns off. I thought it was the 
power supply at first. I only figured out it was the ram and I 
completely disassembled everything and started putting it back together 
one piece at a time. I got lucky and put the other stick of RAM in first.

So, since we don't know what was said, we don't know what he's been 
told, and we don't know how long the guy's been working on it. If I'm 
the tech and I've been looking at the system for 2 minutes and I see a 
system that doesn't power on and I'm asked, maybe several times, maybe 
very directly by the customer what I think the problem is, I might be 
coerced into saying it could be a bad motherboard, cpu, power supply, 
etc. Start cutting that video up and think of what you could make.

Now, about the guy who said to replace the machine. I can easily see how 
he would say that. It sounds bad until you start running the numbers. 
Given that most of these places charge $250+ to come out and look at the 
system, imagine what it's going to cost to replace say a motherboard, if 
that's what it turns out to be. Figure at least $200 for the board and 
at least another $250 to replace it. At that point a new, probably 
faster, and under warranty computer for $600 starts to sound really 
good. Especially if you haven't found out yet that it is a $25 stick of 
RAM ($25 stick of ram would lead me to believe it is probably a 256MB 
stick, which leads me to believe it is a rather old computer, furthering 
my argument ).

Now, about the 'clean room' guy. Here again, we don't know what was said 
initially. They claim he said that it *may* be the hard drive. So 
assume, again, that the 'customer' is pressuring him for a cause. So he 
starts rattling off possible causes. Hard drives are known for dieing. 
So he says that along with another string of things. So now she starts 
saying that there is stuff on there that she just *has* to have: 
Business records, tax documents, pictures of her cat, whatever. So he 
says, if the data is that important, you could send it to a data 
recovery shop and explains the process, including the clean room part. 
In fact he even points out that you would have to put a price on your data.

I've been in situations like I mentioned above. I've learned to not 
guess until I know for sure. I never let them pressure me into guessing. 
Guessing is a waste of time, but I know there are people out there, 
especially insecure people, like some geeks, that can be pressured by 
assertive people. Before I would condemn anybody, except maybe for the 
news station, I would want to see the entire, unedited video segments, 
but that is not going to happen. News media is not about telling a 
story, it is about selling sensationalism.

<end of rant>

Garl

[1] http://www.memorytester.com/