Who gets to be the "tech" person or support that everyone calls to?


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8 hours ago, shockz said:

I stopped being friends and family (outside of parents) IT support after almost two decades of being that guy.

 

Took way too much time, never took my advice afterwards, and then they always moaned about something after the fact and blamed it on me (keeping in mind that these systems are already on life support and 15+ years old), and was getting tired of getting paid with "beer and pizza". Let alone those high school and college acquaintances that haven't talked to you in years, but suddenly contact you hoping for a deal.

 

That and that fact that I'm a sysadmin at work, it was starting to be a 24/7 thing and I just need some time away from the constant barrage of maintenance and day to day. 

 

I also stopped it as a side job making actual money, once I saved what I needed.

 

If someone wants to actually pay me comparable shop fees, once and a blue moon, maybe, but not having to be the go to person is entirely refreshing and don't think i'll ever go down that road again.

Woah. Thankfully I've never had someone like that. 

 

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I also stopped it as a side job making actual money, once I saved what I needed.

 

That just caught my interest. How often did you do that, and how did you work with that? 

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On 4/6/2018 at 11:04 AM, InsaneNutter said:

such as setting up Xbox Live and forwarding the ports so they could get an open connection to Xbox Live instead of a strict connection.

Aaaaarrrghhh. I hated that one. I remember monkeying around trying to get that one to work @_@.  Thankfully, most of the ports are open now by default. Haven't had that issue in several years.

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Over the years I've created websites for people, setup domains, email hosting, dedicated servers, VPN's, installed custom firmware on devices and so on.

 

I've never minded helping family or friends with stuff as I've always enjoyed it. Now things have moved on to mobile / tablet devices i don't really get asked for help all that often, on the occasion someone wants help with something i'll still happily help them.

 

 

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5 hours ago, Jose_49 said:

Aaaaarrrghhh. I hated that one. I remember monkeying around trying to get that one to work @_@.  Thankfully, most of the ports are open now by default. Haven't had that issue in several years.

 

From what I remember I gave the 360 a static IP and forwarded port 3074. The problem I found was when someone had more than one Xbox 360 in the house.

 

For the second 360 Upnp had to be enabled on the router, the problem there was some ISP provided routers had buggy implementations of Upnp so the Xbox would never open the port. Usually a router running the DDWRT firmware had no issues though.

 

Your right though thankfully everything seems to work a lot better with the Xbox One.

 

I remember helping a cousin with the Xbox One, it turned out he had a double nat. I disabled DHCP on the second router and everything worked great after that. Other than that no one's ever asked me for any assistance with Xbox Live in a long time.

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I am the one everyone always calls.  Can get annoying at times.  Especially when I spend all day working on computers and come home to it.  All I want to do is relax for a few.  But I suck it up and help.  I also tend to help friends of the family as well.  I don't charge anything except if I need to get parts, but they tend to give me money anyway.  And some people will not take no for an answer. 

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Me.  Heck, there were times when the local library was too cheap to call in the tech crew that handles their PCs,  my bro was working there before moving and advised them to call me in to look at some issues.  I didn't charge them anything, I think that made them happy.

Most infamous instance was when they couldn't get Word to start on one of their office PCs.  The tech guys uninstalled, tweaked registry etc... no dice.  Guess what I did?  I deleted the file labeled  "start" and bam, instant fix.  I guess when they uninstalled office, they didn't manually delete the folder, which contained a corrupt start file :p  

Now days I collect odd machines in hopes they'll bring me great fortune.  There's something I'm trying to buy right now, but not sure how to go about getting it. Sooooo expensive..........

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