I was recently asked to do a little spring cleaning for a friend of a friend, on his labtop. My friend brought this labtop home during winter break and returned it to his friend a couple weeks later. I did a clean wipe of the system, re-installed Windows 98SE, added back his necessary applications, and installed/setup any included hardware (as requested by the user).

Being a favor I only asked for $60 in return. And mostly because he didn't supply a floppy drive nor a dongle for the PCMCIA Ethernet card (so I had to burn a CD anytime I needed to put something onto it). The job took me round about 4 hours (even though the labtop sat in my house for two weeks), I even installed the free versions of AVG and Zonealarm since he had neither a viruscanner nor a firewall and was using a broadband connection.

Here is my delema. This guy is pissed because he paid me $60 (via a personal check) and now that he has his labtop back, the printer and USB CD-Writer are not working. The reason they are not working is because he gave me niether pieces of hardware and thus I didn't install drivers for either (nor did he specify the models of the hardware). He did however give me Nero to install, which I did. Now he's threatening to take me to court unless I come over and "fix" it. "Fix" meaning setup his printer and cd-writer... and he refuses to download and install the drivers himself (as in his own words he knows nothing about computers).

So why not just go over and setup those devices? Well this guy lives pretty far away, and is way out of my way for the two minutes it would take me to install the drivers. And I'm pretty sure I ain't getting anything extra out of going there. Plus this guy is a raging maniac who verbally assaulted both my brother and myself over the phone when we told him there was little reason for me to drive all the way down to install something any basic computer user should be able to do.


#1 Can this guy even take me to court? He keeps blathering about the check being a legal binding document, and I've already cashed it.

#2 There is no written contract between to two of us (outlining what was to be done with the system), I gave no guaruntees on anything, I'm not running a business, and the machine is working fine otherwise.

#3 $60 is nothing... I know professional tech's that charge $85 an hour to come out to your house and trouble shoot. But seemingly this guy thinks I owe him the world, and is ready to drag my ass to court for "damages", to his everyday work routine I guess, which would obviously exceed the chump change I charged him for my services.

So what legal advice can you give me if any... if indeed this guy does end up dragging me to court. Chances are I'll end up walking someone "smart" enough through the steps to get it working, or drive my ass all that way just to shut him up. But I would very much like to know about the whole check thing, and any other legal stuff that might pertain to this situation (or more importantly future ones). Thanks.