Like Monk I still have to make the odd site visit to users, family, or friends who have computer problems and no amount of remote control software is going to ever eliminate that. Most of the time the problem revolves around either dust in the machine, a cable problem, or some ‘new’ piece of installed software that’s caused the boot process to fail. It’s curious that I never really have an idea of the problem when visiting a site and you never know what to expect though the user seems to expect you to be able to fix the problem in moments. On one visit I ended up having to move chairs and sofas around in their living room in order to trace the path of the ADSL cable as that seemed to be the source of the problem and it turned out the microfilter was missing but the user didn’t know where the master socket was in their house!

Of all of the problems the boot problems are often the most complex to fix as typically the user will ask me to ’save as much data as you can’ because backups haven’t been run and the computer now contains all the family photographs or music. This rules out a complete rebuild (my favourite solution) and so the hours tend to tick by as I try and track down the source of the problem. It’s just fortunate I still get that sense of satisfaction when the computer blinks back into life and the user is happy again - at least for a short while.