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If only $50 was all it took to fix a PC.
My family has spent more than $300 on techs to try to fix problems with my mother's computer so she can simply use email and play word games on her desktop. If she lived closer, maybe we would have been able to find a cheaper way around it, but even after completely wiping her hard drive and re-intalling, the thing wouldn't work within days.
Granted, she's working off of a local wireless network that she understands how to fix about as well as she does how to perform cold fusion, but really, it should take more than that...
We spent months, off and on, trying to have things fixed for her so she could email her grandkids and do her minimal surfing...punctuated frequently by phone calls that start "It's not working again, I can't get online..."
After several heated debates within the family, I finally bought her an iBook. Six months later, she has not had a single problem. Not once. Doesn't lose the network. Doesn't give her the blue screen of death. Doesn't misbehave at all.
One story? Sure. But having worked in creative environments my entire career that have people on both Macs and PCs, my favorite statement from the IT guy sums it up: "I never learned that much about getting deep into Macs because I never had to...they just work. The PCs have always been the reason I have a full-time job."
