I'm Doubling My Rates on Smokers and Compaq Presario Owners

I've been working on a friend's computer for the past week. She has a Compaq Presario SR1000. Let me start by saying, "What a piece of shit." To start (and this is the most minor of all the problems it has), the heat sink for one of the smaller chips fell off. The heat sink is held in place by a spring, and the spring connects to two loops on the motherboard. One of the loops broke. I can't fix the broken loop, so I'm only able to connect the heat sink by sitting the computer on its side and letting gravity do its thing.

As I said, the most minor of all the problems. The next problem (and the one that has taken the most time) was the upgrading of the memory. The computer came with 512 MB of RAM. But that's misleading. The video is onboard and the RAM is not just for the CPU, but for the video as well. The video uses 128 MB, meaning that only 384 MB was left for the CPU. The system is running Windows XP, so 384 MB barely meets the "I'll run, but I won't like it" level. The 512 MB (shared between the video and CPU) was in one chip. The motherboard has two slots. I bought two 1 GB chips. The first went in with no problem. But the second... did I mention that the girl smokes? When I first opened the computer, the dust inside wasn't just heavy, it was black. I mean black. Cigarette smoke is the result of combustion, as is all smoke. Which means that it has a lot of carbon. And that carbon residue was everywhere, in every crevice, nook, cranny, and portion of the interior of the computer. Including in the open RAM chip slot. Now, I've tried for over a week to clean the contacts. I've managed to get a clean cloth with isopropyl alcohol into the slot. The first few times, it came out black. Now its coming out clean. But, still, for some reason, there's some issue because, with the second chip installed, the computer will run fine for some random time but will then go BSOD (blue screen of death). I've given up. It will have to run with just 1 GB of RAM (again, shared between video and the CPU).

The next, and perhaps the biggest, problem is that it's a Compaq. I've never seen a computer so bogged down with extra... crap... than I have with this one. It's bad enough that it's running Windows. That will slow anything down. But, then, it has all of the HP and AOL crap on top of it. That has taken a solid day of work just to get rid of most of it. I'd get rid of it all, but that would probably require a week. I relieved the system of the worst offenders, but the light offenders get a pass. This time. If I have to work on a similar system again, it will be with the understanding that the only that I'll be willing to load onto the system is Linux. That's an hours worth of work that will pay huge dividends in saved time later on.