My co-worker misplaced some files on his win7 acer desktop pc (they ended up in his “Acer backup” folder on c:), after he did an ill-advised save and restore. He called a tech guy to see how to get his old desktop w/ background and icons restored, and the guy talked him into letting him allow remote access for a scan. The dude flips out and is all “Whoa, bro, I’m finding a lot of hard drive errors here!! You need to send me like, 160 bucks…and I can fix it.” The dude’s pc runs just fine, no random shutdowns, no data loss, no bsod, no unresponsive periods. Seems to me this fella who wants the money is full of shit, and I told my co-worker to uninstall the remote access program immediately and get that dude off his pc in case tech-boy decides to install a legitimate problem remotely, and gently let this guy know you’re seeking a second opinion. He tells the tech guy “I’ll just take it to compusa and have them look at it in their repair shop* before I drop that kinda cash.” The tech guy goes “They’ll just send it to me anyways, dude. You should really just give me the money and I can have your pc back to you faster.” That much cash to fix a hard drive error that doesn’t even seem to exist, and with no mention of replacing said hard drive and simply re-installing everything, which can be done for WAY cheaper? I don’t buy it.
*we know most of the guys there and can get a free diagnosis.
the guy is full of shit, and bad shit at that. when i scam unsuspecting
nerds out of there money (wait, how dumb must you be too not know how to find the glitch pokemon right?) for food, i talk just like that…
Being a tech guy myself, I can tell you this guy is full of shit and is taking your friend for a ride. Getting a desktop w/ background icons restored is usually an easy process that takes a decent tech a matter of minutes to do.
I don’t know the whole story, but from what I’m reading it sounds like this guy can’t be trusted. Have your buddy uninstall the remote access program and tell this guy to piss off.
Look, A friend of mine works for the geek squad and he still has the occasional problem he asks for my advice on. This is just BS. Tell your friend to get as far away from this guy as possible and go to a real technician. If you can’t drop the change there may be a school nearby with an IT Certification program, if that is the case, they can generally fix your computer for next to nothing.
A hard drive error? At most you’ll need a new hard drive, a new in box 2tb hard drive can be as little as $75 from Seagate, and it is a pretty nice drive. After that, just do a 1:1 clone of the partition onto the new drive, then expand the partition to fill the whole HDD within the Windows Partition Editor(I hate the Windows editor, but it works well enough). I feel this guy just wants money, and If he’s trying to BS others out of it, he’s doing a terrible job. If there is a lot of errors, your hard drive shouldn’t be working well, if at all due to all the bad sectors. I have a laptop with a bad HDD that I never felt like fixing. It takes a while to boot up, and loading even the smallest program takes a long time due to the reallocated sectors scattered position on the HDD. This PC is fine. As for the Icons, have him run a system restore to a time before he moved them.
hahaha…i came in here because i wanted to see Cutwest’s response. Before i opened the thread i said to myself “i bet Cutwest is going to advise him to beat the scammer up” lo and behold…
I agree Cutwest, Hell if it was not out of my way, I would track the scammer down and beat his ass on principle. Obviously this isn’t the first time this dude pulled such a scam.