As I see it you helped a friend of a friend, not your friend. That's completely guilt-free billable, especially for an after hours call. Show me an after hours furnace repairman that won't charge for travel time.

-Zeke

Oh. That's another pet hate of mine. When they have a crack at fixing it even when they've got no clue and then lie!

It's always a memorable moment when you open up the case and discover scorch marks on the motherboard because they felt that one of those "black flat things" had gone bad and needed to be replaced with a 100W soldering iron most commonly used for soldering pipework....

Of course you have to ask them what's happened in there and they'll say nothing at all. They've never open it before in their life alledgely and it came like that... Anybody got a number for Asus because I think I know where about 2 lbs of their pipework solder has gone if so...

I'm pretty sure I knew what had gone wrong with that PC as well. It had one of the IBM deathstar 60GXPs and had died which was causing it to not boot. I wasn't going to diagnose exactly what happened as they'd fried the motherboard beyond repair already.

I normally don't charge my friends or family but they understand that I'll get something in return. A couple drinks or a meal. Nothing particularly much but just enough for them to know that I'm not doing this for "free". It's just to stop them bugging me for every single thing that happens to that computer again.