I have a friend, who like me fixes PC's. However she reads nothing technical, does no research, just sheer trial and error. A result of this is that she has weird ideas about how PC's work.

After running with no AV for a couple months while downloading gobs of hentai and torrents from public warez trackers while telling me she is an expert and has never gotten a virus in her life, she NATURALLY got a virus.

She attempted to use Gmer, could not understand it (partially cause she refuses to google anything or read readme.txt's. I then told her to use TDSSkiller from Kaspersky to check for any rootkits.

The program has a setting that asks if it should check for unsigned drivers.

SHE DOES NOT KNOW WHAT AN UNSIGNED DRIVER IS. Fair enough, lots of people don't, but she refuses to google anything.

She ran it, then when it showed a long list of unsigned drivers, chose to delete them all. Rendering the machine unstable, and her DVD rom unusable. (Not quite sure about that though)

btw, she fancies herself a H/W tech, but the last Laptop she opened up (hers) is still in a kazillion lego explosion like pieces three years on.

Factory Restore time:

She couldn't get the Factory Restore disks to boot from either the external DVD she has nor the internal Bluray.

Told her to change boot order in BIOS, which led to an argument because she claimed no such option exists.

Cut to...

Day 5 of system down time.

Her BF drops it off.

I go into BIOS, set to boot external first, then dvd then HD.

Still boots from HD.

Remove HD as a boot option. System boots from Disk and runs factory restore.

Call her to tell her, she says thanks now she can install the Alienware Factory Restore disk on the Sony Laptop which is what she wanted to do all along.

I say, why did you not just give me the OS you wanted loaded so as not to do this twice ?

She says "Because the BIOS needs to have the windows drivers running to boot from the DVD."

I say lady, if that was the case, how do you install any non-windows OS ?

She starts this long tangent about thats how HER laptop works..

I laugh condescendlingly and tell her to stop talking crap.

She then says she booted from the Alienware disk and it asked her for drivers for the DVD drive???

Then she got belligerent because I told her what she was saying was not only improable, but FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE.

tl:dr

Techie friend thinks BIOS needs windows drivers to boot. Unable to use BIOS. Lacks basic fundamentals.