Don't be put off by the title as I'm sure this happens in all our daily lives, as machines will be....well, machines.
You're late for work, you try to start the car and nothing happens.
After several laps around the car and having kicked the tyres a few times for good measure, she splutters into life and somehow you manage to get both you and the car to your local mechanic.
Whereupon, the mechanic gets the car going first time and you make your exit, somewhat relieved, but perplexed.
I'm sure most of us can relate to this situation and it's fair to say that the same parallel can be used with PC's.
I have just a case right now in my shop.
A PC I built for a customer a couple of years ago, so I feel a greater responsibility than normal.
An Athlon II x 2 250 on which I had upgraded his memory to 4gb a few weeks ago. Last week I added another hard drive, which was used as he couldn't afford a new one. I had been the owner of that drive, so I knew it had very little use and all my in house checks had passed.
I left his original hard drive as a data drive untouched, so that he could easily access all his files as a secondary drive. The 'new' drive was given a clean install of Windows 7 Pro x64 and thus the boot drive.
When he came to collect the machine, I explained again that he would need to reinstall all his programs and games and he also had the advantage of being able to copy save games and other data from his original drive.
The first time he brought the machine back with a blue screen, I asked him directly what program he had been running and it turns out that he had found the Skype .exe and his favourite game .exe on the original drive and ran them both from there, in spite of my....erm, advice.
So I spelt it out to him again and he took the PC back home with him.
Later that day he has another blue screen and I asked him again what he was doing at that very moment in time.
Which was downloading a game, installing a Steam game, talking on Skype, watching a Youtube video and writing a Word document all at the same time.
I had the PC in the shop all day yesterday trying in vain to reproduce the fault, which brings me back to my original paragraphs.
I've lost count of how many times this scenario has presented itself and I find myself saying to the customer:
'Well that's weird...'
In this case, I haven't yet submitted the dmp file for checking only because I've had very little luck down that avenue in the past.
My question is: is he being unrealistic in expecting the machine to carry out so many tasks at one time?