Tag: false information

When good advice goes bad

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Day after day I meet people who know just enough to be dangerous with computers.

Watching a how-to on YouTube about building a PC doesn’t make you a technician.
It doesn’t mean you can give advice or start doing stuff for other people.

I recently had a customer come in looking for floppy disks.
I asked him why and he said “I need it to RAID my new hard drive”.
So that tipped me off he had no idea what he was doing.
Long story short he said he built the PC himself, and didn’t know if he was going to RAID 0 or 1 for better performance (for the record RAID 0 increases performance slightly, but at the cost of halving the life of the drives).
He had no idea you don’t need a floppy for RAID drivers on Windows 7.
He kept saying he already installed the “software from the CD” yet he hadn’t installed Windows?
This is the kind of dangerous I’m talking about.

I also meet people who are completely misinformed.

I keep hearing things like “registry defrag” or “clean out prefetch folder”.

If you don’t know what these things mean on a very deep level, please don’t help spread false information.

And for the record on that comment, registry fragmentation doesn’t affect performance, and clearing out your prefetch folder actually does more harm than good.

Please stop telling your friends/family/customers to fly blind

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I have a request for all of those who fix PCs, or are otherwise involved in the PC business.
Stop telling people antivirus isn’t required, or telling them to use a cheap/free ineffective product.

Can some people survive without it? Yes. But the only people doing that should be professionals.

I’ve heard countless people who are NOT tech savvy at all tell me friends and “computer guys” tell them not to use antivirus.
I would stop listening to them immediately and never get help from them again.

A lot of people are easily fooled into downloading bad files.
Many download off unprotected P2P networks, open every email they get, visit weird websites, and aren’t pros who can see something coming.

You can teach them as much as you can, but they aren’t the pros you are (or claim to be).

You’re doing them no service and are only putting them in harms way, for who knows what reason.