I had a customer call up yesterday fairly pissed that his computer wasn't working properly. The system is just 2 years old, which he purchased from us. He b!tched that he "had the system in our store 3 times in the past year!" I remembered this customer vividly. He was pi$$ed from the get go at one thing or another. The system was ready a day later than anticipated (though we did call and tell him that we had parts on back order).
So, I tell him to bring the computer in, and I will take care of it right away. I will also go over it with a fine-toothed comb, and ensure that ALL the hardware was working fine.
So...he brings it in. Even though there were others that were ahead of him, I thought it would be in our best interest (to save us from a screaming drunk) to take care of it immediately. So, I put it on the desk. He claimed that the "Intel" logo would be on the screen for "five minutes", then would come up with "Non-system disk or disk error".
Fearing the HD crashed, I prepared myself for the worst...with a Win 98 boot disk in hand.
Sure enough...it goes RIGHT into windows. I get a few illegal operations (MMSYSTEM, TaskMon, RunDLL). So, I reboot, and go into safe-mode. Things are OK in safe mode...I get an illegal operation going into Control Panel...but it loads up anyways, and everything seems hunky dory. So, I go into "My Computer", and check the properites of the C drive. Hmm...it's a 10Gig hard drive, and he has 1.5 gig free! So, I clean up temp files, cache files, etc. Ok. Now it's 1.8 gig free on a 10 gig hard drive. So, I check scandisk. Hmm...it had been run 377 days ago, as did Defrag. Our store's policy is that everytime we work on a computer, we run Scandisk and Defrag... So, according to this, he had brought his computer in ONCE in the past year...and it was a couple months after he bought it. So, I checked our records. Sure enough it was brought in last February. His motherboard, CPU, RAM, and Hard Drive had to be replaced. I suspected a power surge of some kind. We had not seen nor heard from the system since.
So, I clean it up (including the killer dust bunnies inside). I reinstalled Win 98 overtop, reinstalled IE5.0 overtop. Everything runs perfectly. So, I investigate where all the space is going. Hmm...he's got 600 megs in MP3s, and 6 GIGS!!! in WAVs. No wonder the system is slowing down!
How do you guys handle customers like this? We will not likely charge him (though the fault was obviously software related, and not hardware), but I'm certain to make mention of the fact that the full hard drive along with the fact that maintenance had never been performed on the system.

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***the Beast
- I only came for the platypus soup