The Thirty-Quid Look

A student mentioned that his laptop had stopped working and that he was sending it to his insurance company so they could replace it. He asked if I could get some files off the hard disk before he sent it. I put the hard disk in another laptop and burnt the files onto CD.

Like almost every computer ever brought in to work by a student, the laptop was full of porn. Quite sad when you consider the student is almost 60 years old. The point of the story though, is not the porn. The student said his son had taken the laptop to a computer shop. The computer shop charged him 30 pounds to look at the laptop. When the son collected the laptop he was told that there was a problem with the motherboard and that it would be uneconomical to repair. When I opened the laptop it was obvious that the computer shop hadn't opened it, they had just turned it on, seen that it wouldn't power up, and then did nothing. Thirty pounds for someone to look at a laptop...