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Journal grub's Journal: "I Don't Do Windows" 10

Journal by grub

This recent /. article had me reflecting on the past. I've been "computer support" for family and friends as long as I can remember. A few years ago, I made a drastic move which has greatly increased my quality of outside tech work.

A Bit of History
Whenever a family member or a friend wants a computer for the basics (email, www, some games, etc) I've always said "Buy a Mac." Unfortunately most of them also have a know-it-all relative or friend (other than me ;)) that I'll refer to as $TOOL who'll say "They're too expensive, buy a Windows machine." so the person does, basing that decision soley on price.

Reality Strikes
Once those machines are loaded with spyware and viruses or just misbehave, THEN they call me ("Gord's been working on this stuff since his Apple ][+ in 1981! He can fix it!") because $TOOL can only recommend cheap garbage, not do the real work.

A few years ago I said to myself "ENOUGH! I'm not free tech support for people that won't listen." I'll gladly give a recommendation and will stand behind it but won't be free support to people that are just to damn cheap or won't listen to reason.

Real World Example
Just over a year ago (before xmas 2002) a friend was looking for a machine for the family, just to do the basics and watch movies on. I said "Buy a Mac, it'll do what you need. OSX is really nice. The machine will have a long useful life. etc etc" Well, his brother in-law (not a geek but you know what they say about a little knowledge..) convinced him to buy a PC.

Recently his wife mailed me from work asking for help because "the internet isn't working." Here's a copy from my sent mail (names changed):

Other than telling you to reboot I'd suggest calling [$TOOL], he's the one that told you that was what you needed. I rarely have to touch PCs at [My workplace] where they pay me, I don't care to do it in my free time.

I know that sounds harsh, but virtually everyone in my Real Life knows how I feel and know that I'm a stubborn prick. Tough cookies.

They Panic
Naturally, people get desperate and offer me dinner, cash, whatever. I WILL NOT ACCEPT THESE OFFERS! If I did then I've set my price to these people. It's like training a difficult dog, you have to be firm. Doctors have begun refusing to see patients that smoke against their doctors' advice; I refuse to work on Windows.

I've set up many firewalls and configured the PCs to DHCP as needed to use them but that's as far as I go.

The Point
Yes, I have a point. This isn't YAGR (Yet Another Grub Rant) The point is that there won't be any end to the virus and worm problem. There won't be an end to shoddy software. I'm not interested in earning a free dinner or a few bucks for work that I know will have to be done again and again. I love working on computers and networking, it's put a roof over my head for over 18 years now, but working on the Windows OS isn't fun. It's like being chained to an oar in a slave galley. Let the neighbours' kid work on it and become a servant, I won't. If you don't love what you do, then do something else. Life is too short.

disclaimer: I do have a Win2k box at home. It's used only for gaming. No email, no "instant messaging", etc. Just games. My real work gets done on my various FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux machines. Oh yes, and my Mac.

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"I Don't Do Windows"

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  • I hear you about the tech support for friends and family. I constantly get asked to provide support. Depending on the person/relationship I may or may not, but I generally decline.

    If I do provide support, it is on win2k, and the user is locked down to a regular user account. You want something installed call me and I will do it. So far so good. No viruses, or spywayre have made it on to any machine I take care of.

    However I am reluctant to recomend Macs because I have never used one. I run Linux on


    • Do Macs really work that well?

      I've had a Mac since I bought a 128 back in '85. The older ones were a bit flaky as far as the OS goes but OSX is really a well done system. In my eyes Apple has achieved the "Holy Grail" of the unix world: an easy to use interface with a rock solid OS under the hood.

      Case in point: my little brother was having problems with his iMac a while ago. I was over there and pulled up a terminal window. "What's that?" he asked. I laughed at first at him as a "clueless luser" but the
    • I'm in a similar boat as Grub, it seems, but he's a bit ahead of me in the "No, I won't help you" abilities. My first experiment was putting a Linux box on my uncle's desk at home. He had the habit of going into system-level stuff in his windows box, dinking with things he didn't understand, and then calling me to un-screw his system. Needless to say, this got old very fast (despite the free beer while I was there fixing it). I put Linux on a new system for him, gave him OpenOffice, the usual browser/ch
      • i'm in the same boat too. at work, if people need help with something at home, i just tell them i bill at a rate of $1000/hour w/a two hour minimum. if they don't like it, they can probably find someone else.

        with family though, i just figured they're my family, they'll always be there, just be patient. sure, my time is worth something, which usually translates into "i'll come down when it's convenient, but that doesn't mean in 2 months"

        i bought my mom (60+-catholic school principal-grandmother type) a

  • Interesting Approach (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Trolling4Dollars ( 627073 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @01:17PM (#8589699) Journal
    I've been "tech support" for a number of friends and relatives myself. Most of them of the Windows variety. The biggest hurdles that keep me from recommending Mac OS or Linux (with the exception of the recent Linux migration for my parents) to people I know are cost and peripheral support, respectively.

    I've argued that the cost of a Mac is worth it if you aren't having to get the machine fixed every few months due to malware. But the counterarguments are always that there isn't as much software for the Mac and that the Mac usually doesn't last that long. I have to admit that the lifespan of a Macintosh is extremely short. My wife bought a PowerMac 601 back in 1994 and the machine wasn't viable (ie. able to run the latest and greatest) by 1996. In fact, it won't even run Linux since it was kind of a "bastard step-child" of Apple's. In general, it seems that you can't expect to use newer software on Macs once they are beyond their first two/three years.

    The situation on Windows PCs is only slightly better. You might get four years max these days before the latest "cool software" won't run on your version of Windows or your processor. It didn't used to be as much of an issue until about the Windows 95 era. Plenty of people stuck with Win 3.1/DOS even though it was total shite. They were able to because many applications weren't Win95 only yet. I was in that world for a while. But as soon as Win95 came out, I noticed a lot of places stopped carrying Win3.1 software fairly quickly. I HAD to upgrade. And I only had a 486 at the time. It was only a year old at that point and I noticed a TREMENDOUS slowdown when I finally migrated. I wound up having to get an "upgrade chip" to turn my 66 MHz dog into a 100 MHz donkey.

    Linux (yes I'm a little biased)... hehehe, well it runs on most systems depending on what distro and apps you plan to run. I recently took an old P II 450 dual processor system from 1997 and installed RedHat 9 on it for my whole house "application/file server". With some patches to the kernel, it runs like one of my lower speed P4s runs Windows XP (work system). :) In my opinion, machines SHOULD last about 5-7 years average, but the computer industry doesn't seem to want that.

    The biggest hurdle, to recommending Linux, is that we have people who don't know a thing about computers, but they want to burn CDs and use digital cameras and scanners. Unfortunately, Linux isn't friendly enough for me to set up a box and leave with someone. I can get it doing all the basics (like I did for my folks and my wife), but throw something like plugging in a USB camera that I had no hand in picking and it all falls apart. It's not that the camera CAN'T work under Linux, it's that it doesn't work automatically. It might need tweaking, maybe a kernel patch or installation of some drivers from a project that hasn't made it into the USB support in Linux, etc...

    The Windows world of installing drivers and support, while pretty hairy, is still a little better. At least I can walk the user through popping in a CD and clicking next. The Mac world "just works". I keep hoping that Linux will eventually get there. I can't imagine trying to walk someone through compiling some kind of driver/kernel patch just to get some new whiz-bang gizmo to work. There is the real problem. You can't really consider it unusual behavior for a user to go out and buy something they have no clue how to use and they still expect to use it. The same goes for software. I had to explain to my parents when I migrated them to Linux that they couldn't go to the store anymore and buy off-the-shelf software. If they find something that is lacking on the system, they have to contact me and I will try to find something that will work. Fortunately, their needs are simple, so this won't be much of an issue. But for those people out there who buy any program just because it seems cool, this would be another source of frustration.

    Is there an answer to these problems? Not yet,

    • I've argued that the cost of a Mac is worth it if you aren't having to get the machine fixed every few months due to malware. But the counterarguments are always that there isn't as much software for the Mac and that the Mac usually doesn't last that long. I have to admit that the lifespan of a Macintosh is extremely short. My wife bought a PowerMac 601 back in 1994 and the machine wasn't viable (ie. able to run the latest and greatest) by 1996. In fact, it won't even run Linux since it was kind of a "bast

    • My wife bought a PowerMac 601 back in 1994 and the machine wasn't viable (ie. able to run the latest and greatest) by 1996. In fact, it won't even run Linux since it was kind of a "bastard step-child"

      If you mean a PowerMac 6100/60|66, which had a PPC 601 processor.. they can run Linux! :)

      I have MKLinux running on 4 at home (old project). There's also an active sourceforge project which releases Linux kernels that run on the older PPC Macs. Don't have the link at the moment.
  • Have I got a shirt [thinkgeek.com] for you...

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