Weekend Word - Sunday, Aug 17

I got to the office around 8:15 am again this morning. I had a rather slow one on the bench and it was taking forever to get updated.

Kathy brought breakfast in about 8:30 am from Mickey D's.

We worked on the couple of machines left to finish up, teaming up on the slow one to keep it always updating or rebooting when needed. Since it was so slow (needs more RAM), updates took much longer, so I tended to start them and walk away, coming back in 20-30 minutes to see if it was ready to reboot.

I finalized the notebook with the keyboard and he came to pick it up and the one with the replacement LCD was ready, so the owner came to pick it up. I have another of her's as well to repair, it also needs an LCD, so I will order it Monday and she will pick it up next weekend. I have gotten pretty efficient at LCD replacements and working on notebooks even with my large hands.

A guy came in with a Mac and needed some assistance. Me, being the confident one, give him a half-hour training session on how to use his new Mac. Chris B and Smiley will be proud, I didn't curse it one time, but I did have to reboot it because the Finder kept crashing when reading his Kodak Photo CD and then it wouldn't eject the CD since the files were 'still in use'. Rather than try to kill each process, I found it was easier to have him reboot.

The guy who bought the power supply came back in with the PC. It was running, but it was running Vista, so he couldn't get into it, not knowing the password.

My confidence level high, I told him I could get in. I put it on the bench and booted it up. It came up to a screen waiting on 'Vanessa' to log on. I tried the obvious password of 'password', to no avail. I thought for a second and typed in 'love' and BOOM I was in.

That's right, people, I guessed the password based upon the user's name. Today, I was on top of my game. If I were a swimmer I would be Michael Phelps today. I was almost quicker than Usain Bolt running the 100-meters. Nothing could stop me now.

The guy was astounded. I created him a local administrator account and sent him on his way.

I had a few more PCs come in and I finished them up. One of them, an eMachine, arrived about 4:10 pm. It was getting hot and shutting down. I knew it probably needed a good cleaning. I opened it up and it was packed with gunk. I cleaned it up and suggested to the owner she replace the Bestec Power supply that was in it with a more robust one. She agreed.

I had one more to finish removing some pesky spyware on, so I finished it up and then proceeded to clean this one up, taking the aluminum off the CPU fan and washing it in the sink to removed the caked-on gunk. I applied some of the CPU paste and reassembled everything, adding the new power supply and called the owner to tell her it would be ready in 10 minutes.

She arrived just as I finished scanning it for spyware. Amazingly, I found *nothing* wrong. No malware. Nothing. There is a first time for everything I guess.

After finishing all of that up, I headed for the house about 7 pm.

Weekend Word - Saturday, Aug 16

Since I was coming in early this morning from the Metroplex, I arrived at 8:15 am at the office. No sooner had I gotten there than a lady came in with her PC, needing it looked at.

It looked like it was going to be a busy day, as I received another one to work on shortly after 9 am. I still had the one from last weekend to finish up, a notebook to repair with a new LCD that had just arrived and notebook I had been waiting on a keyboard to replace. That made 5 on the bench and it wasn't even 10 am yet.

I worked my way through them and got most of them done before the end of the day. I had the one with the replacement LCD finished and the notebook with the bad keyboard finished and just needing Windows updates applied, so I left it running overnight upgrading it.

As the day wore on, I got a few more things to troubleshoot, one resulting in a power supply sale for an eMachine that the guy got given to him. He was lucky, as I have an eMachine motherboard graveyard hanging on the wall from bad power supplies. This one was just the power supply. I tested it and it showed bad. I placed a used power supply on the board and the box came up, so he bought the new power supply and was going to put it in by himself. Nowadays it's pretty easy to do that. Most things will only fit one way. Back in the early 90's you pretty much had to know how to wire one up or you would pop a breaker or toast the power supply.

I ran out about 1:00 pm and grabbed a Mini Capt's Mate burger from BnB and came back to the office since I didn't have anyone to keep things open while I ate lunch.

Overall the day was pretty busy. I looked up at 7:00 pm and decided to call it a day. I wanted to get home to watch the Cowboy's preseason game against the Bronco's and the Phantastic Phelps Pheat of winning 8 gold medals at the Olympics, so I hurried home, grabbing a quick dinner at the K-N Root Beer to eat when I got home.

I watched the first quarter and some of the second and then turned over to watch the Olympics and don't recall anything else until about 1:00 am when I woke up, missing the rest of the Cowboy game and the record-breaking 8th win for Phelps. I will have to catch both on replay.

Weekend Work - Sunday, Aug 10

As usual, Kathy opened the office up first thing and worked on updating the two PCs that were left to complete from last night.

I arrived around 11 am and finished those two machines up, one a Vista machine and one an XP box.

Sunday's can be quiet for PC repair. Today wasn't much different.

I contacted the contractor and told him to move forward on the bathroom. It was going to cost much more than I wanted to spend, but the work he was planning was going to make the place look great.

He came in and we discussed paint colors, choice of tile for the shower and choice of tile for the floor. I think it will look great when it is done.

Kathy left around 2:00 pm to go clean out the bathroom at the lake house and I finished up the two PCs. The customers came in and picked them up. I used the time to wrap up things I have been meaning to get done for a few weeks around the office.

Around 3:00 pm a customer dropped off an older Dell GX1 that needed cleaning up. I explained it would be next weekend before it was completed because I wasn't going to have time to finish it today.

At 4:00 pm I closed up the shop and headed to the lake. I have to be at the office in downtown Fort Worth at midnight to upgrade a server, so I wanted to make sure we got away as soon as possible to get home in time.