Customer calls, saying he might need a new PC, as it won’t boot up.

Since I’ve dealt with him before, I know his PC is a bit old & rusty, so it might have finally bit the dust.

When I get there, the windows 98 boot logo comes up, but the scrolling line at the bottom stops after a while. So I switch off the pretty windows startup screen & also enable boot logging.

It turns out that the sound driver that loads within autoexec.bat was corrupt somehow. So I disable it, & the PC boots correctly.

Since this only took me 10 minutes, I spend another 20 minutes doing some fine-tuning & disabling HP “additional” useless background programs.