I recently helped swith my friends father to linux, it wasnt originally going to install linux. But it went somthing like this.

My friend DM’d me at 9:00 telling me “my dads computer cant connect to the internet and a fan isnt spinning, he mostly wanted the internet to work” so i did some follow up, has he tried unplugging and repluging in the computers ethernet, have you tried restarted the computer. Really basic stuff, i also asked for a picture of what fan.

IT WAS THE CPU COOLER FAN!! i quickly told him to power off his pc, and asked him if i could come over to help. (Hes not very tech savy) He gave me the green, and i drove to his house. I went to the PC, and immediately checked the fan connectors and tried power cycling the computer. The fan was a BRICK, didnt even move, i noticed the PC was immaculately clean inside. I asked the friend when the last time his dad cleaned his pc. “He cleaned it yesterday” Oh what did he use? “Electronics cleaner and the air compressor” Im 99% sure your fan is cacked, i went to my bag and pulled out a new fan and swapped it in and repasted the cpu cooler aswell. Worked like new. The friend then said “ok can we see if we can get the internet working” I agreed and we flipped on the pc. It then starts to boot windows 10, 20 minutes go by and loads up the sign in page. It was defiantly a hardisk drive, his dad then punchs in his password. And the computer starts to load the desktop, it loads and loads and continued for 20 minutes and yet the mouse pointer kept spinning. I noticed the time was 1:00AM on the computer which was accurate to the real time. His dad opens microsoft edge, i asked my friend why he uses microsoft edge? “Its because its already there” which just deeply pained me hearing those words as ive recently been reading “how to seize the means of computation” which describes internet enshitafaction as a whole. So his dad opens youtube in the browser of depression. And it gives an cannot connect to internet. I told my friend i bet its time skew of the computer not being correct, i then went to the keyboard pressed SUPER+I to open settings.

it wouldnt load settings, no matter how long i waited, the mouse pointer was still spinning. I took my libre booted t440p running gentoo linux and plugged in the ethernet into my laptop and went to youtube. Yep it was the time being wrong, So at this point i asked how old the computer was? Neither of them knew, i then followed up with “how old is the hdd?” Once again nobody knew. I then opened the computer and pulled out a 2013 western digital hardrive. From what my friends dad told me, is that his pc stopped working a day ago and decided to clean it after it wasnt working. My two running theorys on why windows wouldnt load were

The hardrive is from 2013 and its 2024 so it definitely has data rot. Or he cleaned his pc and got eletronics cleaner inside the hardrive.

Either way i broke the news that the hardive was the problem, i told my friend. I theoreticly could reinstall windows on the hardive and that MAY fix it. But that would be a bandaid on a bullet hole. So i asked what the primary function this computer served. In exact qoute “my dad comes home from work and watches youtube and reads the Vietnamese news” I the rebuttaled if there was any other tasks he does on the pc or files needed off the hdd. He gave a hard nope on the files, and reassured me of his only purpose of the pc was news and youtube. I then told them to buy a 240gb ssd off of amazon which would be delivered the following day, we then upgraded to ZorinOS from windows 10. (I chose Zorin because its LTS and i use it to run my laser cutter and have never had problems with it). The install went without a hitch and the father was enjoying his preformance dancing shows on youtube.

My friend did pay me a little bit, but it was alot of fun and i never really expected to get paid. I purely did it for the fun of it and my friend has helped me out with stuff aswell.

All in all, it felt good to help other and spread foss software