- Aug 25, 2001
- 56,554
- 10,171
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I have a customer, that, upon suspicion of their computer having a virus, proceeded to uninstall random items from the control panel. Rig was OEM prebuilt with Vista on it. Inquired about restore discs, apparently they were never fully made. So, not having a vista disc handy, I suggested upgrading to Win7 for them. They accepted that solution.
So I did the install, and everything seemed to be working fine. It was an Nvidia 6150-based mobo, so Win7 picked up all the drivers itself, it appeared. (Except for maybe the video driver, I think I installed that one seperate.)
I'm pretty sure I tested the audio, by watching YouTube or Hulu, and it worked.
Well, two weeks later, I get word that the computer is having trouble with the audio, and oh, btw, I can't get some of my old children's games to work.
So I get the computer again, and I take a look at the audio. Plugged in a headset, sounds seem fine to me. Adjusted the mic gain a little bit too, so that would work, even though the customer didn't have a mic hooked up. Took me less than five minutes.
I spent a good two hours (almost) putting some of these kids games through the installer and testing them a little bit. Some of them, like the Reader Rabbit games, seem to use a 16-bit autorun starter app, which is of course incompatible with the 64-bit Win7 I put on. But you can manually go into the INSTALL dir on the CD and run SETUP32.EXE, which is both the installer, and the game launcher. So I document what is needed to run on the game's CD sleeves (half of which I replaced for free, because they were natty or missing.)
There was only one CD that was totally incompatible, because it was from 1996, and probably written with 16-bit apps. There was another disc that appeared to be damaged, as it would just hang the machine when I tried to access it.
So I return the computer, and leave it with a mutual third party, and then I just finally got around to calling them and requesting that they pay me for two hours of labor.
Well, she refused, claiming that I should have done this as part of my OS install job. Mind you, I'm not charging for checking the speakers, even though I'm quite sure that they were working fine when I installed the OS. But I would really like to get paid for the time I spent doing compatibility-testing for her software, since she didn't get around to contacting the publishers of her games to find out if they were compatible with Win7, my proposed solution. (Which I informed her of nearly two weeks before I finally got access to the computer to install it.)
So what would you do? My feeling is, if she wants to continue to recieve (cheap!) computer service from me, that she had better pay me for my time.
So I did the install, and everything seemed to be working fine. It was an Nvidia 6150-based mobo, so Win7 picked up all the drivers itself, it appeared. (Except for maybe the video driver, I think I installed that one seperate.)
I'm pretty sure I tested the audio, by watching YouTube or Hulu, and it worked.
Well, two weeks later, I get word that the computer is having trouble with the audio, and oh, btw, I can't get some of my old children's games to work.
So I get the computer again, and I take a look at the audio. Plugged in a headset, sounds seem fine to me. Adjusted the mic gain a little bit too, so that would work, even though the customer didn't have a mic hooked up. Took me less than five minutes.
I spent a good two hours (almost) putting some of these kids games through the installer and testing them a little bit. Some of them, like the Reader Rabbit games, seem to use a 16-bit autorun starter app, which is of course incompatible with the 64-bit Win7 I put on. But you can manually go into the INSTALL dir on the CD and run SETUP32.EXE, which is both the installer, and the game launcher. So I document what is needed to run on the game's CD sleeves (half of which I replaced for free, because they were natty or missing.)
There was only one CD that was totally incompatible, because it was from 1996, and probably written with 16-bit apps. There was another disc that appeared to be damaged, as it would just hang the machine when I tried to access it.
So I return the computer, and leave it with a mutual third party, and then I just finally got around to calling them and requesting that they pay me for two hours of labor.
Well, she refused, claiming that I should have done this as part of my OS install job. Mind you, I'm not charging for checking the speakers, even though I'm quite sure that they were working fine when I installed the OS. But I would really like to get paid for the time I spent doing compatibility-testing for her software, since she didn't get around to contacting the publishers of her games to find out if they were compatible with Win7, my proposed solution. (Which I informed her of nearly two weeks before I finally got access to the computer to install it.)
So what would you do? My feeling is, if she wants to continue to recieve (cheap!) computer service from me, that she had better pay me for my time.