It's dangerous admitting you know something about computers at parties as you'll often find yourself being asked to have a look at the host's dodgy system and you spend the time in PC Hell.
Jeremy Allison describes just such an evening in his ZDNet blog. He foolishly agreed to help setup a relative's laptop and found himself in a hole.
The big problem with IT support is that something simple can turn very bad very quickly and often from an angle you didn't expect.
Jeremy's experience is a good example as the trial edition of MS Office 2007 which bought him undone.
The solution involved re-downloading the Microsoft Office trial. He's lucky he's not in Australia as his relatives might have been on an uncapped 200Mb plan and that download would have cost half the price of the Office 2007 home edition.
Jeremy doesn't say how long this debacle took him to resolve, but my guess is he wasted many hours with the problem.
This illustrates why tech support is hard and why merely "knowing something about computers" does not qualify you to become a tech.
It also shows why do it yourself support is a recipe for frustration and a great deal of lost time. Small businesses that go the DIY path often waste a lot of their own time and end up with a substandard system.
On another aspect, I hadn't closely looked at the trial MS Office products and didn't realise copy and paste was disabled along with the "save as" function.
This is dangerous stuff for the typical computer user. It basically traps customers into buying the new product. We'll be recommending avoiding the trial edition once we confirm this.
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