In a message dated 11/2/01 6:01:12 PM Pacific Standard Time, 
radhaz@redshift.com writes:


> The first thing I would do is strangle your brother. (^^)

He's coming back into town mid-November to stay w/ us a few months. Your 
suggestion is already at the top of my agenda for day one!

> Have you attempted to run Scan Disk (Start 
> 

I did that once or twice already before we had to bring it into the shop. If 
I remember correctly, it came up with no bad sectors or any other problems. 

Oh this little story might give you a chuckle. Remember I said that the shop 
had the computer for a week and they were done with it, they said it was 
working fine? Well, after we brought it home that evening and fired it up, we 
still had all the error messages. No progress at all! 

Their receipt said there was a 30 warranty on their work. I called them up 
the next day to let them know the problems were still there. I spoke with the 
manager and found out what the tech did was put the comp on his table and 
turned it on. He then walked away for a while, came back later, saw there 
were no error messages and declared it fixed! He deleted a few minor programs 
w/o our permission that he said *could* cause conflict in the startup 
procedure. For this they wanted to charge $60. They were supposed to call 
first before they did any work but didn't do it so they lowered their fee to 
$35. 

The kicker is that when I reiterated to the manager that the error messages 
were still present and there was no change in how it ran, he told me that his 
tech had given it a clean bill of health and of course he had to believe what 
the tech said! He *generously* offered to let me bring the computer back in 
to have the HD reformatted, win98 reinstalled and aol installed for only an 
additional $125. Of course that was only if the drivers to win98 were 
present. If they had to DL them, it would be around $150!

Needless to say I declined his offer.

Vic