It’s just fucked

As a computer geek with a lot of non-geek friends you can imagine I get asked to provide tech support a lot. I generally don’t mind, so long as they’ve at least tried to identify the problem. Good examples of this are:

them {color: red}
me {color: green}

• I can’t connect to my wireless modem.
• My computer has a virus but I can’t get rid of it.
• My computer crashed and I lost the file I was working on.

Lately however I’ve had a few exchanges along these lines:

Them: I need you to fix my computer.
Me: What’s wrong with it?
Them: I don’t know.
Me: What do you mean you don’t know?
Them: It’s just fucked. It runs really slow.

These are the ones that give me the shits. In order to avoid them in the future, here is my one step guide to un-fucking your computer.

1. Buy a Mac.

Knowing that you won’t listen to me on that score, I also have a four step guide to un-fucking your computer.

1. Back that shit up.

   The first rule of computing is that we keep backup copies of everything. The second rule of computing is that we keep backup copies of everything. Okay, so this wont make your computer run faster, but do it anyway. Do it now, motherfucker. Is your computer running slow? Is it making more noise than usual? That would be the hard disk’s death rattle. It is only moments away from breaking down. Get out some blank CDs/DVDs and back up everything you can’t afford to lose.

2. Remove all the programs you don’t use.

   You can do this by clicking the on the start menu, hitting control panel and then double clicking “Add or Remove Programs”. If you are unsure which programs are safe to remove you can ask me.

3. Defragment your hard disks.

   There’s a good guide to Defrag here. You’ll need about 10-15% free disk space for the defragmentation to work properly.

4. Install a virus scanner.

   I recommend AVG Free Clam Antivirus because, well, it’s free. It auto-updates its virus definitions which is also nice.

If your computer is still fucked after all that then I’ll be happy to take a look at it for you.

Update: This morning AVG informed me that their free virus definition updates will be discontinued, so I can no longer recommend them. Time to go for Clam Antivirus instead.

Another Update: it seems AVG does provide free virus definition updates so long as you are on the latest version. Whoops.