I get called out to fix a printer that won’t print.

Once there, I find out that the PC had previously been taken away to have an infection removed (by another company… a competitor, of sorts).

I manage to setup the printer by unplugging the usb port before installing the drivers.

But while I’m there, I notice the PC doesn’t work very well… strange errors from the firewall, and it tends to lock up when trying to open up the antivirus application… and its quite slow for a 2.8 Ghz P4 with 512MB RAM.

I’m surprised that this is a PC that has been cleaned of an infection… and some things are obviously not working correctly.

The customers are friendly and talkative, so I get to hear a few things about my competitor.

It turns out that the PC was away (being worked on) for over 2 weeks, and the customer got charged for about 5 hours of work (over $400).

So the customer was not overly pleased, as the technician was not as super as his name would imply :-).

I do some extra checks, but I admit to the customer that the PC has some strange problems… and it probably needs some work done (partly to prevent the lockups, and other errors when the PC starts)

I leave after 1 hour and I’m sure they’ll call me when they need their PC running faster.