Hehe! I’ve been there! I actually had people ask me to switch them to 600×800 from 1024×768 because “everything was so small” and then complain stuff looks ugly.

I got around it by just setting it up so that Windows uses the hueg (not huge, hueg) icon set, and increasing the default font size.

I encountered something really “wtf” last week.
A user wanted to change his 17″ crt monitor into a 19″ tft one, but wanted to keep the old resolution (1024×768 instead of 1280×1024, which is the tft optimal setting)
Then he complained about the screen being fuzzy and irritating :-S
“But else it’s so small …” is the answer if you try to explain

LOL! :mrgreen:

Luke, don’t forget PICNIC.

Problem
In
Chair
Not
In
Computer

lol

Time to dig out a User Friendly strip that fits the current mood . . .
http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/06jan/uf008708.gif

Oh man, you are lucky! :mrgreen:

It’s hilarious the first 20-30 times it happens to you. It gets old real fast though.

That’s kinda funny :-)
I’ve never encountered people like that, but it would be hilarious :p

The thing is – random people will ask me for tech related advice as soon as they find out that IM a “computer guy”. It’s like, I meet someone for the first time in my life, I tell them what I do, and then they proceed to give me a vaguest problem description ever, and expect me to instantly come up with a solution for them. By far my favorite is this one:

“You know… On my computer… When I open it up, like, this thing pops up and it says something. And then I can’t get to my Microsoft… Do you know what that is?”

Yup, of course I know what it is. It’s PEBKAC also known as the ID.10T code.

I also frequently get:

“could you send someone a virus that would break their computer?”

and

“could you hack into my girlfriends/boyfriends myspace/email?”

Like Ze said – regardless of what our true specialization is, people just assume that we are IT specialists by day, and hackers by night… Sigh…

Mostly i’m being spared from all that hassle, but sometimes i have to fix a computer from a friend or close relative. Not for strangers. It’s quite fun! You have a little chat, they give you beer, and in the end (after an hour or 2) they insist you to take the money :-).

But if I can charge them $200, require that they bring all the OEM CD’s and make no guarantees about their data surviving the procedure it might actually be worth while…

What can I say? I am a BOFH!

Don’t get me wrong, I take care of family. I have gone to both my parent’s and my wife’s parent’s homes and setup DSL and Remote Desktop. I even have a slick SSH tunnel to my house to remote control their systems when they call me at work.

I have another friend that I barter with. He is an excellent concrete guy, so I built him a really nice game box w/support and he poured my RV access at my house.

My wife’s friend that I charge . . . well, sometimes we have to take a stand. She is the type that believes that she won the free {enter hi-tech device name here} and immediately clicks the link, even after I have told her numerous times that they are scams. Might as well make a few bucks for the headaches.