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BBC Writer Tries PC Repair, Finds Poor Software
twitter writes "BBC author Paul Rubens tried out amateur computer repair and wrote about it. All of the software was for Windows, and he finds what most of us do: "Most of the problems I've been called to look at have been caused by viruses and spyware, some by strange software [conflicts], and only one by faulty hardware." He then flames the whole world of computer repairmen as 'a bunch of unqualified amateurs.'"
1. Zonealarm was good a couple of years ago. Now it's all bloated, very slow to load, and crashes a lot (last time I checked at least). Try Syngate free version instead.
Check again. I've been using it w/o issue since I started running Windows again in 2002. It's at the latest free version and my Windows XP machine has a better uptime than my Linux box.
2. Use only one anti-spyware software. remember, we don't want conflicts do we? it'd be worst these days because most anti-spywares offer "real-time" stuff...potential conflicts.
An obvious troll. Just to clarify... SpyBot and AdAware catch stuff that the other one doesn't. It is necessary to run them both at the same time. SpywareBlaster has no effect on AdAware as it doesn't do the same thing but SpyBot does recommend it now.
If its a explorer.exe dll module (or iexporer), kill explorer from Task Manager, then run cmd to delete that dll from dos mode.
It's people like you that make the computing world "scary" and "difficult".
Seriously, maybe he should try going to PC World (in the UK), and getting the "Qualified" "Professional" staff there to help him? Many "professionals" are random people with no experience who have been put on some useless training course.
Perhaps if they were paid more than your typical McDonalds employee they'd be a bit better than said fast-food dispensers.
I had a discussion with a friend about people in the IT world (I'm not one of them). One works for a large corporation's IT department. He was unaware of SSH, VNC, but was concerned that the wireless router they use in their house doesn't use MAC filtering or WEP. He also has a piece of software phoning home to Toshiba constantly, uses an unencrypted IM client, and gives you a blank stare when you talk about SSH tunnels to a squid proxy.
In this case the unpaid amateur knows 100x what the well paid IT professional does.
As long as the market continues to allow that sort of crap to go on the computing world will continue to suffer as a whole.
I think there was an article quite a while ago where some asshole was claiming that OSS developers are "unqualified amateurs". Guess what? Many of the people who managed to write operating systems in assembler in a few K in the 80s were also "unqualified amateurs".
... all you have to do is say "I CAN FIX THAT!" and have more of a clue than the person with the broke gear.
:P
Considering the number of retards and windows installs in the world, this is fairly easy to do.
Computer "repair" is a lot like plumbing... the difference is that you don't see everyone who's plunged a toilet calling themselves a plumber and billing out 50$ an hour. Real plumbers know their shit and get paid accordingly- likewise, a real pc tech who actually knows their shit is earning their paycheck without breaking much of a sweat.
The problem is finding competent people. It's reasonably easy to tell if your plumber doesn't know shit, but if you're not some degree of geek, you'll get totally snowed by "computer repair"- though if you're some degree of geek, you don't need one.
just because he's ignorant of two relatively niche applications doesn't mean you know 100 times more than him.
If you're so concerned about WEP and MAC filtering why wouldn't you be using encrypted IM clients, encrypted tunnels for POP auth, and stopping programs you are using from phoning home?
He's using industry buzz in general conversation but fails to understand how to even minimally protect himself. That's how I know.
Insightful? When he doesn't know that CPUs do in fact have multiply instructions, with hardware (for example, funnel shifters) and microcode to implement them? Isn't that CPU hardware and microcode "the computer"?
Well..... I disagree. And I am in the business. My business offers a wide range of customer services, from PC repair (promotional rate of $40/hr, will go up to $50/hr in September), line of buisness systems, etc. at a higher rate.
My business is growing pretty rapidly. People will pay for support if they have the option of getting quality assistance.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The difference between a computer repair and a car repair, is that the computer repair center can claim your computer broke from a software issue that isn't their doing, whereas a car mechanic isn't going to say, "take this car back to the station you got gas from, they gave you bad gas".
I've heard car mechanics tell people this. You would be amazed at how much bad gasoline is out there. Case in point, one lady I worked with was having lots of hesitancy problems with her engine, after a few trips to the mechanic, he eventually deduced that nothing was wrong with the car and that she was merely getting bad gas. He didn't charge her a great deal and told her to try filling up at another station in the future. Voila! The car magically started running fine. Its all too possible that older gas stations and such may have issues with their tanks getting moisture in them and such, even in the new age of federally mandated double walled tanks. Never rule out bad gas is my point.
zosxavius photography
This is the classical example of somebody not understanding how to use a computer.
If a laptop fails:
First backup your things (which you should have done in the first place).
Next reload the system software. Windows will eventually screw itself up anyway.
Finally you contemplate other options.
The attitude of "somebody should have created an easy downloadable solution to fix my world" is increasingly being deployed instead of brains.
We are 4 people in my hopusehold. 12 computers of which 5 are running Windows, the rest running Linux. Even my kids have no problems with windows other than windows itself. They all know the drill: Keep your stuff in a directory structure called "My World". In case of malfunction or our linux firewall screaming bloody virus warning: Time to find the Knoppix disk and delete the windows system directory. Then you reload windows and the world is at peace once more.
How in the world do you think I could otherwise keep this menagerie runing?
Ya put those on a machine, have them updated regularly, and it's really hard to get a messed up Windows install.
The only thing that really gets me is that while Spybot S&D has an awesome TeaTimer resident proggie, it still requires users to answer whether or not they want to add/remove esoteric sounding registry keys. The average user (not me) has no idea what those keys will or will not do. It's the only gap in the above stated armor that could be problematic.
When I had a hiatus in my normal flow of software development projects last year, I attempted to build a sideline business in this kind of service. I was "convinced" by the older blog article posted here a couple of summers ago "Technical Self Employment is a Fat Paycheck Waiting to be Pocketed" as well as the Joshua Feinberg "Computer Consultants 101" course which I bought (my word on the latter: don't get it. I found it a cheap and quick "high" but very unhelpful in the longer run.)
Short version: this is a REALLY crappy business. This "story" of low end tech support being a viable career option seems to have been floating around for quite awhile. The pundits claiming that it is a good refuge for a underemployed techie are full of crap. You're much better off temping at Home Depot if you need quick money, and continuing to interview for a normal professional IT or engineering job.
The basic problems:
Customers expect a quick, easy spend; the potential liabilities are huge; there is extremely little pricing or maneuvering room even for due diligence.
What I found:
The market is absolutely glutted with freelance computer techs. I have absolutely no idea how this writer got off the ground so easily. My chamber has about 30 out of a 800 business member base. All quoting the "we are your virtual IT department" line.
As far as marketing: I had joined the chamber, I told every blessed professional and in-business person I knew, I gave talks, I advertised, I sent out a mass mailing of postcards. NOTHING. Or, very little business. I gave it a year.
The clients suck. You really need a signed agreement with every business you deal with, in order to limit your liabilities, but many won't sign one. The same people who will blithely sign away their rights at the Quick-Lube station that fills their crankcase with moldy Kayro syrup will act like you're trying to scam them if you ask their signature on an agreement to begin work.
Payment is a challenge. I let just one local business, an "ESTEEMED CHAMBER MEMBER", go without collecting on the date I was there. The jerk didn't pay me (a lousy $190) until he called me needing more work, several weeks later. Another business, a health club, stiffed me out of over 1/2 the billings for an onsite service call. And so on and so forth.
Respect? You're treated like the janitor by most clients.
More on due diligence: when a user has a really trashed out (virus/adware laden) PC, AND does not have any of the system recovery disks, AND wants their precious data recovered first... the amount of time it can take is essentially bottomless. You just can't tell them that it may be 3 hours to 15 hours. They will simply not accept that. And you just, absolutely do not know even the order of magnitude until you get into it.
EVERY job I got involved some hideously unpredictable ball of mud.
So you wind up looking like an asshole all the time because you can't predict within the $50 what the client may spend to bring their PC "back", so you wind up working like a dog to "keep it low".
The reason nobody in the retail area wants this business is for the reasons I've listed. It's just too bloody hard to undo the damage that end users do by unsafe computing practices. That's why most stores' service departments just format and reinstall. Their attitude is "screw you and your data, tough luck" for a reason. They know that few will pay to have it "done right". And you can't run a business that is so marginal.
about his "overqualified amateur" rant, since it was off the cuff.
And his point was that appliance repair people get training in fixing a specific item, whereas computers have such varied configurations that it is nearly impossible to be an expert in fixing EVERYTHING.
Or at least, I hope he understands that.
I happen to be one of those "unqualified amateurs" doing home and small business tech support for low rates. I have twenty years in the IT field, so I know the basic facts about IT: nothing works and nobody cares. I have only been messing with current PC systems for the last three years, but I learn fast and usually have some idea where to look to solve a problem. But there's no doubt that the bewildering variety of screwups in both hardware and software make it very hard to do a quick, efficient fix.
As an example from my own machine, a couple weeks ago I moved some partitions on the 160GB hard drive to make more room for my Windows 2000 and Windows XP root partitions (thankfully my Linux is on the other drive). Once I started accessing the partition that ended up on the other side of the 137GB barrier, both Windows crashed totally.
I reinstalled and reconfigured, making sure I had SP4 on 2000 and SP2 on XP (which I had before the crash). After accessing that partition again, I discovered that neither OS could see files put in that partition by the other OS.
To make a long story short, after nearly a week of wrestling with this, and being amazed at some of the bizarre behavior (all of which clearly indicated that at least one of the OS's simply was not seeing that partition in the "right" place on the drive), I discovered an MS Knowledgebase article that helpfully stated that Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 cannot read the partition table correctly for "some" hard drives! (God forbid that MS tell us WHICH drives, WHEN, and WHY! Now I know! Big drives!) And I had installed 2000 with SP3 and THEN applied SP4 - too late, homes!
Now, I spent a HELL of a lot of time on Google looking for ANYONE who had similar symptoms or a similar problem. Nothing - on the Web or in Google groups. I should have checked MS first, but even there it was not easy to find this particular KB article.
Apparently, only under the specific conditions I had - a particular drive, installing 2000 SP3 first, then applying SP4, and possibly dual-booting with XP - did this problem arise.
Multiply this by the tons of proprietary motherboards, manufacturer-tweaked BIOSes, "custom" hardware, scores of thousands of software apps, and add in a pinch of spyware - and how the hell can ANY tech ever hope to figure out what is wrong in less than two to four hours?
Which, at the rate techs charge, is a hell of a lot of money for some home user who has, on a national average, maybe $100 disposable income for the month. It's no less of a problem for a business user if a critical server is out of action for that time.
Another tech told me about trying to get a wireless LAN working for a small business down in Palo Alto. The frequency saturation in the 2.4GHz band was so bad there that the users kept getting kicked off or re-associating with the wrong access points. He tried everything - other brands of wireless, bigger, more directional antennas - nothing worked. Finally he had them buy a Cisco access point that was seven times more expensive than the ones they had been trying, which put out 100mw instead of 20. That worked - so far.
For the last week, my AV has been turning off its email scanner for no apparent reason. No indication why, no good explanations on the company's forum. Since turning off the outbound SMTP scanner, it seems to have stopped doing it - so far.
PCs are a nightmare today, no question about it.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Not to state the painfully obvious, but the way most retailers work, it's no great suprise their employees say unintelligent things like "it's the gold contact that let you know it's a USB 2.0 cable because electricity travels faster through gold." (That is a direct quote, by the way!)
The big chain stores charge customers $50 an hour (for in-house repair) to upwards of $100 an hour (for on-site work) and then turn around and give these hard-working individuals a whopping $10 to $12 per hour to survive on. The word "geeksploitation" comes to mind in a big way. It's this reason that most computer repairmen who tolerate this onerous situation (you can make $10 an hour doing data entry if you can just *type* fast) and hire on at these places are literally the bottom bidders in the system. That is just barely enough money to keep a geek in new hardware so they can learn the intimate details of troubleshooting it (which is cheaper than regular training classes, and includes employee discounts on the hardware). The majority of these poor, damned souls either stagnate, or tolerate the situation only long enough to get jobs at better places as either system administrators or network engineers, who are typically only marginally less underpaid.
Your best bet to finding really skilled geeks is still word-of-mouth to find an independent contractor or small group of geeks acting in concert.
Stop the geeksploitation!
Do you have any reason to believe that the power supply that comes with a $40 case is more likely to fail than a more expensive one?
Yes. My sample included 10 computers with hardware failures, about a half of them with cheapo PSUs. 3 of the failures were due to a PSU blowing up, all 3 being of the the cheapo variety.
One of the PSUs took the motherboard with it, and another took a hard drive full of data, and, by some strange fluke, a DIMM socket and a DIMM (the rest of the motherboard still works). This is not real statistics, mind you, but it gives you an idea.
==
A typical failure mechanism is like this. Cheap PSUs can't make it through a brown-out. The H-bridge transistors have to pass higher current to compensate for the lower input voltage, and start to overheat. A good PSU would use heftier transistors, and the controller would shut it down if the voltage dips too low.
In a lousy cheap PSU one of the FETs reaches the point where the silicon starts to melt, and it becomes permanently conductive. Then, the controller switches the bridge, causing a through current that melts the other FET in the same side of the bridge. One of the FETs then vapourizes with a loud bang, leaving a visible crack in the plastic case of the FET. During all this the current through the transformer gets switched chaotically, causing spikes in the secondary windings, and killing the cheap underrated regulators in the secondary circuits, which then pass the spikes to your expensive components. Something like that.
Another problem with poorly built PSUs is that the irregularities in the input sometimes make it to the output, causing crashes and hang-ups. If you want to build a stable system, start with a high quality PSU. It doesn't have to be expensive. Just pick one from a company whose name you (or your friends) recognize.
How can you check for a cheap power supply?
I can think of a few ways, but they all would be too involved unless you were about to order a 1000 PSUs for a production run.
Cracking it open and looking at the quality of the PCB fabrication (lack of hand soldering) would be my #1. Hand-soldering usually means cold solder joints in some of the units.
A DESTRUCTIVE test for brown-out response would be quite easy - just load the supply to the rated max, then lower the input voltage. The thing should shut down, and not blow up. Of course, this test would only be destructive to a supply that wasn't worth its name in the first place. Vary the speed with which you lower the voltage.
Another test you could do would be to hook up a scope to the output, and look at how it responds to spikes/dips in the input. If there are any spikes at all, especially in the UP direction, it's no good.
Now, IANA-electrical-engineer. Not all electrical engineers can properly design and test PSUs either, even though the PSU design is usually consireded a low-grade job that's given to an out-of-school junior EE as a "training" excercise. The truth is that you never get hailed a hero for designing a good PDU, yet designing one is quite involved.
There shouldn't be a whole lot of sediment in their tanks. If there was, it would be 'disturbed' on a regular basis. A high volume station will fill it's tanks several times a week. And the stations have filters in the pumps that are much better than the ones in your car. If they are getting sediment in the fuel from their supplier, the station is going to be annoyed because their pumps would need a lot more maintenance.
It's not uncommon for a station, particularly an older station, to have water in their tanks. Maybe an inch in the bottom. It won't normally be pumped out because the supply tube for the pumps sits several inches from the bottom. (Stations don't want to pump their tanks completely dry, a little rain could cause them to float if they were empty) The water would be disturbed when the tank is filled, but in comparison with the amount of fresh fuel being added, it would be minimal and not likely to affect your car. And if it has an ethanol mix, there won't be any water in the tank at all.
Personally, the only bad gas I have run across in the last 15 years has been in vehicles that have been parked for long periods of time. (or my %^&# motorcycle that I didn't get a chance to ride last year, and didn't re-winterize)
If you're worried about fuel quality, pick a station with high volume. BTW, in many parts of the country, gas is supplied by pipeline. Distributors all pull from the same pipeline, so there is little, if any, difference in the quality of the fuel being sent to stations.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman