1. Your data is not important.
That’s right. Your documents, pictures, videos, and other stuff on your hard drive is not important. That is, unless you have it in at least one other location, if not more. Hard drives die. USB keychain drives get lost. Your toilet overflowing will ALWAYS happen immediately over your home office space. If you don’t have at least one spare copy of your information, preferably stored in a safe place outside of your home, it is an indication to everyone that your information is not important to you. Think of it this way: if your hard drive started making smoke right now, would you be able to get a new drive up and running without losing important stuff? If you answered “no”, then you are playing Russian Roulette and you have no excuses. Don’t whine to anyone about losing your baby birthing pictures. Now that little “Taylor” is starting kindergarten, you’ve had plenty of time to back those up. Nobody really cares about your loss because you didn’t seem to either.
2. That dent on the computer from 7 months ago voided your warranty 7 months ago.
It doesn’t matter what happened after you dropped your laptop. The moment it hit the pavement (or enjoyed the glass of Two Buck Chuck you let it taste), the warranty was long gone. Now that it is making crazy sounds like it is dying, or the screen is flailing around like an epileptic having a seizure, be prepared to pay for your mistake. Yes, it is YOUR responsibility. If you care about your warranty, it is in your best interest to have the damage fixed, that way when you have something go to hell later on, it should be covered under the warranty. If you have cash coming out of the wazoo, you don’t need to worry about this because you won’t complain about paying whatever you need to pay to get it working again, right? The point is that the moment you screwed up, the warranty was done for. Everything after that is just really unfortunate for you. Speaking of taking responsibility for your mistakes, you backed up your data, right?
3. Your cracked screen is not a manufacturing defect.
Laptops are designed to be rugged. They are made to withstand being moved around, and even being used hard. When I say hard, I don’t mean abused. Dropping a laptop enough to dent the case and not crack the screen is getting pretty lucky. Having your cat “Mittens” jump on the screen is very unlucky because Mittens probably just cost you $800. Also, when you are in a hurry and leave your writing instrument on the computer keyboard, bad things will ensue when you close the screen. Grabbing your laptop by the screen to move it is about as smart as grabbing your 18-month old child by the head to move it. Treating your expensive electronic device like a cheap toy, then complaining about warranty coverage is like street racing your Honda Civic SI then complaining when the dealer won’t fix your blown automatic transmission because of all of the manual shifting you’ve done with it.
4. You are not a computer technician.
It’s kind of like taking your car to the shop and proceeding to tell the mechanic exactly what is causing that knocking sound in the engine and what he needs to do to fix it. If you’re the expert, why are you having someone else work on it? Now, I’m the first person to make fun of lame computer support technicians. Assuming your person has adequate skills and understanding of your problem, shut up and let him or her do their job. If you want to know what went wrong, that’s fine. If you want to know how to fix it, that’s fine too. Don’t ask to know everything the technician went through to diagnose the problem. And if they are diagnosing the computer with you present, don’t ask them what they are doing every mouse click they make. Chances are, they can fix it faster with you not distracting them, and most of the time they won’t mind showing you the correct path to take to fix it. What a tech doesn’t want to do is tell you what they are doing, realizing that it is not going to address the problem, but have you remember that step and mess something up down the road.
5. The programs you use to download illegal music and videos may cause problems.
You are a fool to think that using LimeWire or Kazaa or Bearshare or eDonkey or whatever the current file-sharing program du jour is will not create problems for you. On Windows, there are security problems left and right. Using programs like that then complaining about whatever virus you picked up is like going clubbing and having random sexual encounters without wearing a condom then complaining about the burning feeling you have later on. On the Mac, LimeWire causes so many file system problems, Alsoft’s DiskWarrior is almost completely reliant upon LimeWire’s corruption issues wreaking havoc on your system. If you don’t get scared by people suing you for breaking copyright law, maybe you’ll get scared for risking your data to software that is made primarily for breaking the law. Your call, but in my opinion, it’s not worth it. Speaking of risking your data to LimeWire, you have a backup right? Nobody cares that you lost your pirated 82GB iTunes library.
The list is longer, and I will post addenda to this list as things come to me. Despite the tone my rants took, I am not truly trying to be mean. I’m trying to show the novice computer user things to do when they need to do them, and what not to do unless they are ready to accept the consequences.
