I can fix this PC, boss, but I'll need to play games for hours to do it
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Whenever a family member sends their PC to a "repair shop" (usually because "it was too slow") they get back a freshly-reinstalled PC and most of their files dumped inside a folder called "Backup". It then falls to me to reinstall all of their software while praying that their tax software has a "restore from copy" function or, failing that, at least a clearly-marked "database.db" file that I can overwrite.
My friend recently had his 3090 die, and somebody was able to diagnose the problem and replace the dead components - but it cost something like £100. That makes sense for an item he bought for £600, but if it cost £10 for something, it makes more sense to replace it.
Personally I'll happily spend a week fixing something purely out of spite, against all economic incentives, but I wouldn't want to do it for a job. I have in the past replaced a friend's SSD and recovered his data from the older one that he somehow reformatted by accident. But it's a lot of effort.
Just wondering what you'd get, if you take the above to an extreme?
A tiny, immutable OS core? Low-level libs/drivers cached from a network, 'installed' on-the-fly / loaded as needed upon reboot? Apps loaded & run from their distribution archives, without intermediate install step?
Sounds not too different from how computing was done in early days (apart from 'cache drivers from a network').
Makes one think what this "install software" nonsense is about, really.
ChromeOS
You might get some shade of nixos: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/
(Frankly, default nixos already does a bit of the whole "apps aren't installed per se" thing - `nix shell nixpkgs#foo` gives you a shell with foo "installed" but only until you exit the shell and run garbage collection.)
Ultimately the customer wants the cheapest and fastest solution. They don't care that it was their limewire viruses or bonzai buddy IE extensions or whatever that slowed it down.
Here's the big kicker imo: If we were charging $100 for a reinstall/backup, and we could sell them a faster computer for $400, then there is very little wiggle room for real repair to happen. Parts + labor could easily exceed the cost of a new budget machine. If there isn't a RMA (free part replacement) involved, the repair probably wasn't worth it.
It's just the economics of computer repair, imo.
Did a bathtub soap off and dry in oven, used alcohol to second wash, replaced like 4473838 billion caps, and had to rewire a few traces. Good times, and still cheaper than a replacement board.
(The soap ph was particularly important due to all the acidic leaking caps)
But that was computing costs in the early 90s.
Powerful.
They spilled it all in the top vents, and didn't open it to clean. It oozed everywhere inside. They only cleaned the outside.
The guy told me "it smelled really bad for a while, then seemed fine, until the ants came"
My rec time is limited, I'm not spending it troubleshooting bullshit. Like, I will a little? But if it turns into that weird genre of "well this app bumped this app and now I can't play this specific game while running discord without crashes" and the fixes involve enabling and disabling services or updating drivers or whatever the hell, nah. Reimage windows, off to the races.
Surely that only counts if you actually execute on some light backup and restore? Like... if the computer isn't working, and you "fix" it and hand it back unable to run the software they had, I'm not sure that should count as "fixed".
The second was hardware issues, especially slow hard drives that started to fail but hadn't quite failed yet. There was a tool to read all data and print drops in performance (again, I forgot the name). This was before SSDs became commonplace – I don't know what it's like with SSDs.
I was as productive as anyone in terms of number of customers helped/week, but looking at my coworkers there were definitely two types of techs: the ones like me who knew what they were doing, and the ones who didn't. I know this sounds rather arrogant and pompous, but it's true.
As a company, you can give people the time and space to develop this know-how, or you can't, which is how you end up with "just reinstall shrug" type of repair shops. I was lucky enough to work at a small independent shop where we were given lots of free space and autonomy, and some of us took this to become pretty good at fixing stuff in short turnaround times, which benefited everyone.
We developed a bunch of internal tooling for this, too. I maintained Anduril, our FreeBSD-based live disk with tons of stuff (the company name was Aragorn, so this seemed like a good name).
Of course, this store no longer exists. Or rather, they pivoted to business support, because there's just no competing against the online stores with €10 profit margins on every laptop they sell, and there just aren't enough consumers to care about quality support to make the financials work out.
Back then of course adware/malware scanners were huge. We certainly did hook computers up and start a bevy of automated scanners and tools and fix performance issues. And every single time it cost a lot more labor and a lot more money to the customer. But it's up to them and a lot of people didn't want a reformat or had a more expensive computer that wasn't as economical to replace.
Believe me when I tell you that productivity wise, a guy reformatting 5 computers at once in an hour flat is lapping anyone who is spending multiple hours per computer running those scanners and tinkering setting by setting.
You don't need multiple hours; that's my point. Hardware check (which you need to do in any case) + autoruns were all you needed in most cases.
I spent close to four years doing this as my full-time job. Our standard rate was €40 (a lot less than your $100 for a reinstall). We didn't go bankrupt.
I don't know what the current situation is, but the amount of crapware back in the day was just staggering; every installer offered to "helpfully" install an extra toolbar or virus scanner or whatnot, which is how people ended up with 3 virus scanners and 8 toolbars in IE.
When I was working company IT I'd just wipe and reimage. All their stuff was in OneDrive or Sharepoint, and 90% of the apps were in SCCM. That way I didn't have to worry about missing a problem or weird issues relating to updating instead of installing from scratch, and it was faster so they'd get back to work sooner anyway
well this customer, who begged us to get this done, had some website or plugin or lord knows what that reinfected them, and they brought it back the following Monday and complained. I got fired for not following policy. Nevermind that reimaging wouldn't have fixed the stupid of this customer, they still would have brought it in on monday, but "we reformatted the drive" would have sufficed as "we did the work, you messed it up, pay us again."
ETA: we had a whiteboard with a "record virus count" and it was between 30 and 40 thousand infected files found when i left. I can understand reimaging with 30,000 infected files (at the time a default windows install was only about twice that number of files if memory serves, win11 has 134K files in c:\windows), but 20?
We don't even have a minimum amount of virus, if we or the client suspect there is, no matter what an anti virus program says, we format the computer. It's easier, faster and infallible, not like antivirus that take more time than a fresh install to run and can miss viruses.
If you survived messing with a virus, you could get a Windows evangelist to help you fix the mess, but that would be very expensive.
Noticing that you can replace the database.db usually requires some software engineering knowledge (understanding / guessing how things work).
I had a couple of issues regarding my desktop PC turning itself on. I diagnosed ethernet, windows, bios. Recently that PC died, so it must have been a hardware issue (I have yet to diagnose which part broke, sadly I suspect the motherboard), but the electrical issue could have been caused by that part.
I had a bunch of weird problems over the years that would have been really weird to diagnose.
"Remember, kids -- the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down." --Adam Savage
> The Register itself uses the term Regomiser as a user name generator for its registration. If this contributor is a "reader Regomized as 'Felix,'" it would mean a reader registered and was reassigned that random name.
> Have you had to play games as part of your tech support duties?
Well sort-of. My first co-op job was at the Ministry of Transportation. They had a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet that had planning costs for highway construction projects. All I had to do was add or fix up some of the formulas on them. All quite rudimentary, but it seemed at the time there really wasn't many in the office with 1-2-3 experience as the PC and software was new to the office.
So the rest of the time I chatted with folks and waited for the coffee+snack trolley to come around twice a day and otherwise take breaks. I got bored fast as there was no other work to do. One day I brought in my Atari 400 and just started writing games. The others seemed to enjoy seeing them too. Got a good work term review. They asked me if I knew any other smart candidates and I mentioned a friend of mine who was hired for the next term (after an initial mixup with another person with the same first/last, co-incidentally a classmate but not the friend I meant).