Chemical Shift

A few days ago, I helped a couple in the apartment building with their computer. A week or so prior, they asked if I knew anything about computers and if I could provide them with some kind of boot disk. I grabbed a Win98SE emergency boot disk on a floppy I had in one of my computers a gave it to them.

Well, when they asked for help again I went to see what was the problem. It turned out their Windows install CD and a big crack in it. Obviously it couldn’t be used to reinstall their OS. I grapped a backup I had, so that I could reinstall it for them. Unfortunately, both their DVD and CD drive were having problems as well. I went back to my apartment again and grabbed an IDE CD-ROM drive that I got for free a while back.

Nevertheless, I hooked up a known good CD drive, inserted the installation CD, and changed the BIOS to boot from CD and see both IDE channels. The install went without a hitch, but took over an hour, and along with the process of analyzing their computer before hand had taken at least two, but closer to three hours total. They were really appreciative and I told them they could keep the CD drive. I told them I was happy to help them out and didn’t need anything in return, but the guy wanted to do something for me anyway. He gave me $25 for my time. He told me how he spent quite a bit to get some other guy to fix his computer and ended up making things worse. I gave him my phone number in case he needed any more help.

The process was more of an event for me to try to be more social. Its part of an effort for me to be more personable, especially for when I go on job interviews, one of which I have in about two weeks. I am really hoping to do well on this one because I would work with one of my former group members and its in a location that my wife and I would like to live.