Computer Repair Broward Horror Story

The following is an example of why sometimes I'm too amused to tell people no.
Mother can barely operate her computer despite using it for work daily. She got a free trial from one of those 'download to watch' movie sites and constantly asked me how to use it. I avoid those like the plague so told her I had no idea. 3 weeks later she calls me in a panic saying her HDD was full. She has a 500gb and 250gb so she should have space. One DL/Install later of Folder Size and I'm staring at the culprit. She'd been dling movies to watch. Sometimes copies because she said she didn't know where the first download went, couldn't be bothered to look so just downloaded it again. When asked where did she think those downloads were going she said "I don't know, just not to my computer."

Little sister's bf has Logmein installed for me to remote trouble shoot. He calls one day and says his net's not working. Asked if his modem is on, general hardware trouble shooting. We figure out his net's on but his browsers won't open which I tell him is good since if his net really didn't work, I couldn't do anything remotely anyway. He asks if I can check it out. I say sure and ask if he's doing anything that will be disturbed by me remotely controlling his stuff. He says no, he's not busy. So I log in to his system and ask one more time if he's sure and he says it's fine. When I access his desktop I'm greeted by the video of a woman getting plowed in the ass. I guess he was going to chillax and watch porn while I worked. Awkward.

Ex mother in law. Would not give up her old Compaq with its whopping 20gb HDD. Called me to say her system wouldn't let her save anything anymore. I looked inside and said her HDD was full. She said that was impossible, she saved everything on 3.5 floppy. So I go look. HUGE file in My Documents. I asked what it is. She said she'd been saving copies of all her emails in case 'The net loses them.'. I just...stared. When she asked if she should put them (more than 2000 emails) on floppy, I just smiled and said she sure could give it a shot!

Mother. "Why can't I burn this movie onto this disc?" "Because the movie is 5gb and that's a 700mb CD, not DVD. Also because you have a CDRW drive not DVDRW drive." "There's a difference? Can't I just get a bigger CD?" "...."

Mother. Wasn't me that fixed this one but I did try. Mum's comp was suffering massive slow downs and crashes. We ran everything. Spybot, Malware bytes, Norton, etc. Nothing seemed to work. She took it to a professional to try and fix it. 3 days later he had found the problem. A toolbar she'd installed was generating viruses and he said he managed to remove them. How many? 40,000 apparently. After that mom got a sit down course from me of how to update and run her spyware, antivirus and to actually READ what she agrees to install during program updates.

The worst thing I've see
IN a computer was when a tower was brought in by a customer who, judging by his smell, smoked at least two packs a day. He told me that the computer had just stopped working, as in nothing happened when hitting the power button.

When I was able to get to it, I verified that it, indeed, did not start. The power supply pilot light came on, but no fans moved. I opened it up and saw that the interior of the PC was completely coated in this bright red dust. All the components were coated in it. Normally, the dust in computers is grey, so it was pretty obvious that the guy smoked very close to his computer.
I put on a dust mask and took the computer out back to where we had the compressor. When I hit it with the air, it kicked up a bright red, stinky (yes, even through the mask) cloud about the size of a large car. It's definitely the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in computer repair at Broward. After 'dusting' it, I started it up and it seemed to work just fine after that and seems to first time in the history of computer repair Fort Lauderdale.