I want to do something like this, except I’d examine existing computers and networks in small businesses, and establish security and intrusion prevention policies. For like $100 a pop. Having that as a side job would make it easier for me to accept 9-to-5s that don’t pay very well. One of these days.
I already have it. It doesn’t mean much these days.
Did that too. IT consulting is a nice gig, but you have to live in a good area for it. I didn’t, and I’d make 3k in a month, but not have anything to do for the next two or three months.
history repeats itself LOL
For future reference: DRD is a pirate. The pirating business has fallen on hard times lately unless you live near one of the major centers of pirating industry (e.g. Somalia, or the basement of some kid who downloads a lot of music), so pirates have had to branch out into other fields.
i freelance, can i post gore?
I liek their priorites, lulz.
Can have the roof falling inside the damn house, but persons just gotta have that new tech product.
You go right ahead, dude.
one month after i built my neighbor a “future-proof” “budget” Starcraft 2/WoW box.
“hey, man it’s working funny…”
i go check it out. his office smells way worse than it used to. he tells me he’s been gaming so hard he didn’t feel like going outside to smoke. he’s trying to save the rest of the house from smelling so bad, so he closes the office door. leaves the lit cigarette near and exhales his lung smoke into the front intake vent.
come on…
Spoiler
it took me over 20 minutes to toothpick/X-acto knife all of that out. solid blocks of sludge in between each fin that went almost went all the way down to the motherboard. after 1 month.
Words of Wisdom
(we found out later that it wasn’t overheating which made it “act funny.” it was acting funny because the SSD’s caching allowance was too high in relation to how much actual drive space he had. keep that in mind when you start working with SSDs for people that play MMORPGs and RTSs)
my neighbor’s wife: hey, my friend’s computer is messed up. can you take a look at it?
me: do you know what’s going on with it?
mnw: she says the screen won’t turn on.
me: ok bring it
i met her in my drive way. already i can see the PSU looks like it had a summer home in the tobacco and dog factory. i plug it up in my house and try to turn it on. instantly makes the room stink. PSU works though. screen acts like it’s plugged in, but no visual. the motherboard is beeping. i pull the case panel off…
sigh…
Spoiler
disgusting dirt, but didn’t look too bad, so i took it outside to put the leaf blower on it. none of the dust stuff moved. i touched a lump of it with my finger. it’s oily. it’s not just dust… it’s animal hair and dust infused tobacco tar :wasted: i looked at the display port from the inside because i noticed it was a bit shaky when i plugged the monitor to it. all but 3 of its pins are broken (this would happen if whoever plugged the monitor in kicked the connecter to make sure it was in there nice and good). and a couple of capacitors were blown. motherboard’s done. she doesn’t have the money to get a new motherboard, so i just took her hard drive out and put it into one of my scrap computers that just needed a HDD to run. perfect recycled computer.
Words of Wisdom
don’t leave your computer on the carpet floor if you have animals, smoke, and don’t vacuum regularly (like almost everyday).
cellphone rings
'hello?"
“hey, you da computer mang?”
“i guess 
”
“dis Delano. you know me?”
“nah, i don’t think so?”
“ok. anyway, i think i got a virus. you’ll fix it?”
“well, i’ll have to take a look at it to see what’s going on with it…”
“aiight, i’ll be right over”
he comes over, and i do know him. his friend dated my adopted sister and he tried to mack on my cousin and she rejected him loudly in the middle of Walmart. he tells me he makes videos with his laptop, but since the screen was working funny, he couldn’t. he gives me this army duffle bag. it’s heavy. it has the laptop and a random flat screen monitor in it; no padding. i lug it into my house. plug the power into the laptop and turn it on
not a virus…
Spoiler
the only slightly visible area is that vertical strip on the left, and it wouldn’t display legible text and would fade to bluish white like the rest of the screen every few seconds. also the extra screen he gave me didn’t work with it. i couldn’t “screen out” from the laptop at all.
i tell him what’s wrong and he says he just wants the information off of it. a few months later, he finally allows me to fix it (replacement screen). and yeah, he had viruses.
Words of Wisdom
don’t drop kick your laptop.
Oh well shit, you DEFINITELY don’t have anything to worry about. Mofos will think you’re FBI or with the mob or some shit. If nothing else they wont fuck with a white guy because they’ll think that’s a REAL good way to have the police come in and start fucking with them. A black guy in a strange hood = he either got lost, or is there to get with some neighborhood chick, which brings out the cock-blocker instinct. If nothing else though they know that the police will see it as just another black on black crime.
Had a client the other day pronounce screws as “strews”
I almost lost my shit. It was hilarious. I tried every way possible to make her say it. It was so funny.
Yeah, I also try not to laugh when I come across people that pronounce WiFi as “We-Fee” and the short form of Gigabytes as “G-Bees”.
been working on a laptop for a couple of days. it BSODs before you can log in. Safe Mode is fine other than it kept changing the time and date every reboot. never encountered that problem before, but it’s obviously some malware. another crazy thing it did would be to revert whatever changes i made. all services and startup programs i turned off were active by the next boot- and it even went so far as to RE-add the programs i uninstalled in Programs and Features (just the names though, once i uninstalled them there was no trace so it couldn’t actually run them.)
here’s my log so far:
1st pass: Kaspersky boot disk = 25 objects
2nd pass: Malwarebytes = 120 objects
3rd pass: SuperAntispyware = 3471 objects (you read that right)
4th pass: Combofix = didn’t count- the deletion log was about a page (during the pass, combofix notified me of an object that was trying to gain net access while it was running)
5th pass: Trend Micro Housecall = 6 objects
6th pass (current): Avast = 25% done, 10 objects and counting…
sigh… at least i finally got it to activate the wireless (which previously only worked in Safe Mode) in regular mode.
EDIT: 6th pass: Avast 58 infected files deleted
and i still can’t install service pack 2 :mad:
Duckie, I had no idea that you work on computers. I also work on computers as well. Just got my Security+ a few weeks ago. Are there any military installations near you? They can always use guys like yourself. I work at Fort Detrick as a contractor and it’s working out pretty well. So far, MCTS, A+, ITIL & PC Security+ certified.
Let’s not forget “Lab top”.
The next time any children ask you why you wear the eyepatch, you should tell them: “Knife fight. The other guy wears two of these now.”
Snake, shit I thought it was bad when I fixed someones PC that power supply had been burnt out by roaches. I could deal with it because we lived in some fucked up places when I was a kid but that type of shit is just nasty.
With that situation, reformatting the drive would be quicker. :lol:
The stories here reminded me of my days as a tech support agent. Weird shit really happens so much that troubleshooting might as well mean shooting for trouble. :lol:
liked for avatar and the mental picture of some asshole wearing an eye patch on each eye instead of just wearing sunglasses.
yeah, but that doesn’t count as “fixing” it. imo techies use formatting a drive as the solution to everything. when researching problems online, it’s usually in the top 3 answers people give. “you’re getting a consistent BSOD with a searchable error code when you do a specific and repeatable action? fuck it. format.” “you got popups? fuck it. format.” many people barely know how to navigate their computer’s file system (tangent topic: i think that’s a big reason why ipads are so popular. they don’t have a native, accessible file system -outside of certain apps. really simple for non-savvy people). you shouldn’t expect a person like that to understand what “format” TRULY means. even if you do a good job explaining it, expect to get a call a few days later asking you where you put their treasured pictures of their great-grandfather that passed away and the storage unit that held the physical pictures burned down and there are no more pictures of him except on the computer and they didn’t save those in the pictures in the “My Pictures” folder because they were special and they don’t remember where they saved them.
i’ve only formatted 4 computers my entire “career” if i have to format, i don’t charge.
honor.
Well, I format my PC every year, just made sure of backin up everything, but honestly, charging for that simply is low.
I grew up in crazy areas like that so it’s not really a whole lot that’ll get me worked up. Unless you’re a hoarder or some shit.
Since most of my fam and friends and friends of friends still live in spots like that I’ve seen it all. I’ve fixed laptops and Xboxes in dope spots and shit.
My cousin got a Dell laptop with a good warranty on it. The screen had to be replaced so I had a Dell tech come out with the part to replace it. We were in the middle of Park Heights & Belvedere (if anybody from Baltimore is familiar). The Dell tech was a white dude that I’m pretty sure has never seen anything like that. I kinda had to calm him down and let him know we were comrades and that everything was gonna be ok lol.
Why do you feel that you need to wipe and reinstall your OS every year?