Fixing your PC Follow

How much, if at all, do you sterilize your pc when you take it to the shop? I can only imagine the amount of information a tech could get by browsing your PC. On the other hand, it seems like a lot of work to constantly segregate information on your own PC in the event that you have to get it fixed.

I remove everything. Although in my case it's entirelyand the 'normal' illegal stuff likeand the like.

Almost certainly unnecessary trouble for myself but oh well. It takes only a few hours to remove everything and to get everything back in place afterwards.

I don't know how I'd ever live with myself if someone found out that I watch anime.

"Hmmm...this guy sure uses the "Delicates" setting an awful lot."

I'm concerned of banking information and personal information. For example, every form in the military has your complete social and other unnecessary personal identifiable information. My solution is to put stuff in the cloud and sign out of my Google Drive and delete my desktop folder, but that would also result in me using an external backup as redundancy.

I would thought by now, a PC without prawn would be odd.

I've never taken a computer of my own to any repair service; I am in the PC repair industry myself and have been for twenty years.

Having said that, I just assume that Google, M$ and the Feds have already catalogued everything that goes on and through my system anyways, so I don't really worry too much about it.

I have a box full of old hard drives (we're talking 10-20-40GB capacities here) that have been in the basement for years. The spindle and platters are probably rusted/corroded to the point of inoperability. If I *have* to destroy a drive, I take it out back with the splitting maul.

I just take my old hard drives and wang on them for a while with a hammer before throwing them in the trash. While someone potentially could find them among my kitchen waste, open and repair them and then glean my The Maxx .wav files from 1995, I figure the chance is low enough that I can still sleep at night. 99.9% of people wouldn't look for 'em, 99% of those who would wouldn't have the skill to repair a beat to shit hard drive.

Edited, Mar 23rd 2015 8:03am by Jophiel

Taking your computer to be fixed is very un-American. You should just buy a new one.

Some ******* patriot you are

I do my own PC repairs so

Me, too. So does my nine year old. I really don't understand how it's an industry at all. Building or repairing a PC is about as complex as assembling lego.

Buy a thumb drive. Heck. Buy a couple. They're dirt cheap. Periodically drop important documents on them. Data storage has gotten so cheap and so reliable and so "large", that it's pretty trivial to keep all important documents backed up a few times over. I basically keep a single directory area on my computer that has documents I care about (tax returns, financial/legal stuff, etc). So it's pretty easy to drag that to a similarly named folder on a removable drive whenever I feel like it. Of course, you can also spend money on some kind of cloud based backup if you really really care. But honestly, most people probably don't have more than half a GB of actual important data. Everything else on your computer is either OS related, or completely replaceable. Kinda silly to spend money saving your EQ setting files and whatnot, but that's the bulk of what you're actually doing with those services.

Oh. Ditto on the repair thing. Who takes a computer into a shop? Buy a virus scanner and use it. That should prevent 99% of software problems (I mention because it's shocking how many people bring computers into a shop because "it's slow"). And honestly, once you start having hardware problems on a computer, it's probably time to buy a new one. But if you do want to fix it, simple trouble shooting usually works. There really aren't that many removable/replaceable parts inside your computer. Umm... Barring something really obvious like a failed power supply or fan, it's either your video card, or your memory. Seriously. 99% of the time. And if it's not, see my point about replacing the computer.

Lots of people take their computers to a shop which is why there's a bunch of computer repair shops out there. In theory, it should be "easy" but we live in a world where my boss doesn't understand why my c.2006 Dell chokes on 7gb PDF files.

Worked for Jennifer Lawrence.