There's always one, usually more, but always one...

There's a saying they have in the used car trade - "There's someone for every car". It's usually reserved for the sort of slack jawed individual who'll turn up on spec & buy a ten year old Mondeo with an expired MOT for at least twice what it's worth. In hard cash.

A similar creature infests the world of IT. You'll recognise them easily enough. Early signs - such as your co-workers 6 year old Windows 9x home computer suddenly "appearing" on your desk without the slightest hint of what might be wrong with it (not like you can't guess) - are easily spotted.

Adopting the demeanour of the village idiot in this situation sometimes helps, but more often than not the donor, desperate enough to have brought in their pet dinosaur in the first place, will not be so easily dissuaded.

I find keeping a selection of whacking & bodging tools to hand is a good second line of defence. A village idiot with a large rubber mallet is always best avoided.

If the donor persists past this point, then further resistance is futile. You will have to deal with the issue. You already know what'll be in there of course - an eclectic brew made from every common variant of spyware garnished with a sprinkling of javascript viruses, and served on a bed of unpatched software with a side dish of Not-on System Crippler 2001.

You already know that - even if you could muster sufficient enthusiasm - it'd take nothing short of a full format & re-install to fix it, that the necessary drivers would have to be hand crafted from pure unobtanium, and that - even in reaching for the power switch - your time expended would be far in excess of what the relic itself might be worth.

You'll patiently explain all this in layman's terms to the perennially disappointed penny pincher in front of you, and then there'll be a selection of whining noises increasing in pitch as the realisation dawns on the dino-keeper that the machine is in fact too far gone to resuscitate, and the only viable option is to buy a new one.

You'll suggest a reasonable spec/price/vendor combination, and the owner of the now defunct box will grudgingly accept you're right.

Once this concept takes root, the usual reaction of the victim is to immediately hunt down the cheapest, nastiest, most underspecified, ill-assembled box they can find for less than 200 beer vouchers at the local "Computa-4-U". It'll come pre-installed with last years CPU, half the RAM necessary to run, and, just to make absolutely sure, a not-quite-free copy of Not-on System Crippler 2007.

Within six months, you'll find this box sitting on your desk, and before you sit down you'll know there are precisely two things wrong with it, namely the vendor & the user.

Unfortunately, there really is someone for every computer. Now where did I put that mallet?