I got a call from a local TV reporter looking to do some kind of sting operation against local computer repair shops. The broad idea is to bring them computers in some (known) state of failure and see whether they actually fix them or whether they scam you.

The obvious idea I had was to leverage my wife's slowly-dying laptop hard drive (now replaced with a shiny new one that works great) and see whether they waste lots of time on other things or whether they zero in on, say, the massive pile of disk errors in the event log. Of course, that disk is only going to get worse as each repair shop pokes at it.

Any other ideas for undercover computer repair shop tests?

Bad IDE cable
Corrupt Windows install

The simplest problem I've stumped potential IT hires with is a static IP address in the wrong subnet.

-jk

This was already done with Geek Squad-type services in Canada. I think their test was a little unfair for this type of home service and the hired "experts" were anything but. It's an interesting video though.

Link

PC World does this every few years or so. They've used a faulty IDE cable, and, uh, I can't find any of the other articles.

There several schools of thought on this sort of thing, IMO. If they're trying to determine who's simply cheating you, do something simple and obvious, like disconnecting the hard drive cable. Even an incompetent shop would find that within several minutes of work. If they're trying to determine who's competent, do something relatively easy to fix, but hard to find, like damaging a cable. More data can be extracted from this based on what they charge you for, like if they replace a bunch of stuff before they find the real problem, do they charge you for those replacements?

You might also want to include a second problem that you don't report, like some seldom-used cable that gets unplugged, like the CD-ROM-to-audio-card cable in the PC World thing, though that one is less relevant these days. Maybe a floppy drive or memory card reader or front-panel USB cable.

That said, what are good difficult-to-diagnose, but easy-to-fix things? Bad hard drive cable. Underpowered power supply? Bad internal power cable? (Hm, that one could be dangerous.) Bad CPU fan? Bad CD-ROM drive. Heck, even a bad mouse or keyboard.

Of course, there are also software issues. Spyware. Virus. Corrupted drivers.

And BIOS things. Bad memory timing settings.

I feel like I should be able to come up with more stuff than this.

The description of the screen recorder setup they used is interesting too. Just be very careful in how you name the files and services, or use a rootkit to hide it (although presumably some virus scanners might pick up on this).

I say edit the boot.ini and see if they simply replace your HDD. Or screw with file associations. Or ridiculously over clock the PC. Unplug the fan on the video card. Those lockups can get pretty random, but it could very easily permanently damage th card. Set the doubleclick speed to waay too fast and claim that the mouse is broken. For a high end test, install a nasty group policy.

Is reinstalling Windows on top of itself really a viable solution?

I suppose I could deliberately expose the machine to some awful viruses or botnet clients or something and see if they can clean up the mess.

Yes, a software problem. Nearly all the home user complaints I hear are "my 1 year old computer is SOOOO slow!". And I often see computer shops offering to "speed up your system" and do virus removal.

Install three different strengths of spyware. One that starts in the startup registry key (easy to find), one that is latched onto IE and has a cleverly named executable, and one that exists only as a DLL and latches on to WINLOGON.EXE (rootkit style).

See if they get all three. See what they do to find them, how long it takes, what tools they use. Of course, software monitoring tools to gather these data may be found. Maybe a hardware key logger somehow inside the case?

Hm, does anyone make a hardware screen logger?! Somehow fork off the video card into a buffer, maybe 1 frame per second (CCTV style)? Wouldn't be convenient for badguys to install on target machines, but good for parents, libraries, etc with good physical security for monitoring purposes. Hm........


And Dan, how did the reporters know to ask you, if I may be so curious?

Maybe contract the Storm worm and tell them that your router lights are constantly blinking and your Internet is slow (since your machine is blasting out spam).

Replace the BIOS setting battery with a flat one. That causes all SORTS of problems, many of which are difficult to track down as they can masquerade as software issues.

Set the pagefile size as small as it will go (2MB? or 0?) and complain that the machine runs really slowly. Make sure it only has 256MB of ram for maximum pain.

Rename explorer.exe to something else?

pca

Dredging up an old thread:

They initially brought me a laptop to dork with, except it turned out that the laptop was super-customized to run some kind of video editing system. It had a custom funky-colored keyboard. It was configured to run on their internal network. It had an station property tag glued to it. Clearly, no good.

Finally, the TV people came back, this time with a 2000-vintage P4 desktop (733MHz). The tech at the station had pretty much wiped the machine clean, setting up an easy cover story. ("I got this as a hand-me-down from work, but it's not working right. Can you fix it?") Conveniently, the motherboard battery was already dead, providing a nice easy test. The TV people wanted something easy to replicate (read: low-impact), so they'd already concluded that they didn't want to monkey around with viruses and worms or anything like that. Instead, they just wanted to wiggle out the hard drive's IDE cable.

This particular box, since it was at some point meant to be a fancy corporate desktop, has some nice BIOS features. It actually complains about the battery and the lack of an IDE drive before it will let the thing boot. Sounds to me like it's practically a gimme for the fixit shops, but it should work.

Maybe the BIOS has "display full screen image at boot" which may cover any battery/disk messages during POST. And disconnect the PC speaker so it can't beep about them?

And for good measure, just to stump these guys, flip the power supply switch to 230 V. If that's not there, just flip the switch to off. Haha, should get them.

Well, they ran the story last night. Here's a written transcript. Bitt might find it amusing that they mistranscribed me in an amusing way: I said "haphazard", they wrote "half-hazard". Also, the part where they have me completing the sentence, describing myself as a "geek, nerd, something like that," I'm modestly confident that I wasn't actually using those words to describe myself. Ahh, quotes out of context.

The punchline was that, given a poorly seated IDE cable, two of the five tested firms wanted to charge $280 to reinstall Windows. The rest seemed to eventually figure it out. Either nobody noticed the bad motherboard battery, or they edited that out of the broadcast.