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Confessions of a Computer Repairman
nk497 writes "What really happens to your PC when it's handed over to computer repair cowboys? We reveal the horror stories from computer repair shops — the dodgy technicians that install pirated software, steal personal photos, lie about hardware upgrades, upsell to the unsavvy, or simply steal your PC to sell on. Plus, we tell you how to avoid such dodgy fixers and find a trustworthy repairman."
Exactly. Don't break your legs and head in a car accident if you don't know how to repair them!
I downgrade them to IE6, uninstall firefox/chrome, disable their anti virus, set their search engine to bing and their home page to lemonparty.org. Then I charge them in bitcoin.
Why do they hate the Geek Squad so much?
Does it annoy anyone else that there are more and more articles here on /. that are submissions of an article/store by the author of the story ?
UPS Sucks
You are going to find dishonest people in any profession, and finding someone trustworthy to work on your computer, car, appliances, etc. requires looking at more than just the price tags. Bargain shoppers get screwed quite often, but if you are willing to pay a little more for good service and able to do some research you can find the good providers. (Not Best Buy)
More like "Don't drive if you don't know how not to crash"
I read the article, some stuff might be hard for the beginner (cable got lose, that might take a while for a person to diagnose) but asking them to upgrade RAM and not knowing how to check how much RAM the system has is stupid.
I think the story to take home here was more like:
Don't go to England and drive on the wrong side of the road and break your legs in a car accident, if you don't know how to repair your legs, the other guys legs and both cars!
Cuz, you know, every time something breaks it's always from manual error, yes?
Only just finished checking over my aunt's computer. She'd paid about £80 because a company cold-called her and said Microsoft had detected a virus on her computer... somehow they also had her postcode. Their 'evidence' for this virus was to show her that not all Windows services were running ('it had shut some down'), and that if it wasn't repaired soon, more services would be shut down. They accessed her computer remotely because she willingly visited a site and ran an executable for them.
I was quite surprised she fell for it. Even a Luddite should realize this kind of cold-calling scam. Maybe the Brits are just suckers? :-)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I once worked in a computer store for a short while, and when a customer had ordered a custom-built computer with a CPU they didn't have in stock they actually made me put one in that was a lot less powerful. While I didn't personally see the customer get the computer, I'm pretty sure they really did go through with that scam. Since then I've never bought from that place...
And yes, that's why I post anonymously.
It's about time they got an article on here like this!
I know most Slashdotters certainly can't build or fix their own shit. That's why it's "Slashdot... news for nerds".
P.S. Slashdot, FIX THIS FUCKING CSS/JS/etc, half the time things are layered over one another, other times I can't post! In Win 7 running Chrome, not using noscript or similar.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Even the most ubiquitous repair group - geek squad at best buy - has shown itself numerous times to not be worthy of trust. If you need it repaired, you need to learn to do it yourself. Otherwise you will get screwed worse than a high school girl at a car mechanic.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's true that you really shouldn't take your computer to most GS places, but the reasons why might be different than what you think. There's always the chance of getting an idiot who has no clue what they're doing. But more often than not, the GOOD people can't really prove themselves because their hands are so tied by corporate policy. The "Diagnostic & Repair" service is a complete and utter joke unless someone who knows what theyre doing actually does the work (and the actual person doing the work will likely NOT be the one who checked it in). It goes something like this:
So no, even if the tech is competent, they don't want you spending a whole lot of time actually SOLVING the problem. They want you to spend maybe 10 minutes at most of actual touch time on a computer, then either get it on the complete shelf, or sell them a new one. Now of course they don't SAY this, but the pressure is there in the form of departmental budgets, and "revenue per transaction" goals. Basically, it's a matter of "if we can't fix it, we're discouraged from actually looking for a solution instead of upselling to something else."
The sad part is, it didn't used to be this way. But with Geek Squad being seen as just an extension of Customer Service (functionality checks on ALL returns, sending store-stock items for repair, and having to ring up ALL computer sales because corporate doesn't think the actual salespeople are capable of selling the much exalted "complete solution" of computer/software/cables/services), there's also no TIME to give each client the attention they deserve. Best Buy Mobile is actually fairly decent, because they're actually allowed to operate as a "store within a store", so to speak. They can't get pulled to other departments (which ALWAYS happens to GS people), and they're allowed to run their department as they see fit. This is why BBYM is one of the few departments that actually makes money on a consistent basis.
So no, not ALL the problems with Geek Squad are caused by incopmetent "Agents." I'll admit that a lot of them are, but corporate has basically castrated the department into nothing but sales drones who can "speak computers."
It is just me, or is this the dumbest article posted here since Jon Katz' tour of duty ? Yeah, duh, 9 out of 10 PC repair guys are shady, and the article's anecdotes sound like they're from 20 years ago. Zip drive ? come on, guys...
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If you read the article, one of the examples given was pretending to put in RAM as requested, but really just running a spyware (and stuff) scan.
If you don't know how to check your computer's RAM, you shouldn't be trying to buy more of it.
I'd say 90% of the time, it's an operator error that causes something to break. I doubt anyone here would contradict me.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
Yes some even do that *double facepalm*... obviously not mine in this specific case but someone else's.
If you're not a pulmonologist, stop breathing.
By most accounts, Geek Squad used to be a class outfit until Best Buy took 'em over; after that, they went downhill fast.
They quoted my father $200 to do a malware cleanup. Unbelievable! (Not sure why he even went there, I've warned him about them before. And yes, he declined the $200 Geek Squad cleanup -- at least he got that right!)
So, we typically pay the guys who handle our massively-complex-bundle-of-personal-information-and-spying-potential about as well as the guys who change our oil and then bad things often happen. The independent ones are subject to basically zero supervision and not infrequently include complete amateurs, some rather dodgy. The chain-store ones are subject to supervision aimed primarily at forcing them to upsell and bill as hard as possible, while working as quickly as possible. Quality results are assured. Wow. Allow me to collect my jaw from the floor.
The only surprise is that anybody is surprised. Even in professions with a very long history of handling personal, highly technical, or discrete matters for their clients, with well developed professional codes, cultural pressures, and often substantially better compensation(think doctors, lawyers, priests) there are innumerable cases of ethical dodginess, laziness, and other issues.
"The trick,” one repair shop owner told us, “is to give the computer a good tune-up to clear any adware or malware that might be slowing down the machine; clean out the cache; perform a spring clean – anything that makes the machine much faster.
“There’s no real need to actually install the strips of RAM that the client has paid for, because they probably won’t know where to look for it. No-one’s going to notice if there’s 3GB or 2GB of RAM in there if it works faster when it comes back from repair, and they’ll probably never look.”
Doesn't it usually take much, much longer to clean up a crapware infested machine than to slap a DIMM into a slot? And isn't ram pretty damn cheap to start with?
Sounds like sort of a silly approach to take.. if the shop just charged for the labor they were actually doing instead of the cheap part they didn't install, they'd make more.
-Lod
I'd contradict you out the wazoo, but I don't deal with consumer-grade gear run by people who click on pictureofosamascorpse.exe.
But regardless of target audience, hardware fails, and it fails more often than people like to think.
lol..
...me.
Seriously, it's not that hard. If you can't be bothered to learn how to change the oil in your car, then you can't really complain when the guys at Jiffy Lube rip you off. The same principle applies here.
Computer repair.. that ain't workin..
It's a shame that there are so many unscrupulous repair men, ripping people off... Most PC repairs are simple, and require very little knowledge, that can usually be obtained with a few Google searches.. for those that can't grasp lefty loosey, righty tighty, well then bite the bullet and either find a geeky friend you trust, or take it to the big chain stores.. (pay for your lameness).. As to software problems, learn the basic "back up things important to you",and realize that a reinstall is the simplest, and often the best solution..
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
It would be helpful if somebody who knew where all the embarrassing stuff exists provided a clear, multi-step manual of how to clean up your machine to a state where it won't embarrass you or worse. There's a lot of places where traces of your nasty, shameful habits are available to people who know where to look for them.
Windows machines might have the most, but I'm quite sure Linux and Apple systems also have their problems.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
"a problem with the power supply unit that we fixed for about a fiver" It doesn't say what was done, but who bills $8 for repairs?
In my experience the problem isn't malicious technicians, just incompetent or lazy ones. Formatting drives with customer's data (no backup or consultation) is probably the biggest one. Pirated Windows installations when there's a COA on the case for the same version (not totally sure what this is about). Days spent troubleshooting a problem that anyone with experience would take five minutes. The list goes on.
make friends with one. Its as simple as that!
Seriously though Im probably one of the shady-ish people because some people say I over charge, but atleast im fair. If you're a family friend/aquaintence i'll do a diagnostic for free. If the problem is as simple as running a few software tools i'll give explicit directions and ask if you'd like to do it. If youre not comfortable doing it i will for a fee. If it's a hardware issue i'll tell you what you need to replace and assess the difficulty. Again, i give explicit directions. If youre uncomfortable I'll do it.
Here's the catch....my time is money. I've been raised by contractors to think that way and im not gonna change now.
Citrix would like to contradict you
1) Yes, there are idiots who do this stuff.
2) Most of these stories are from ten years ago based on the hardware described, but we can assume the same tactics are used today.
3) I service PCs for corporate and home customers - and I don't do any of that crap. I'm not the most hardware-oriented technical support person you'll ever see and I'm not the sort of techie who knows Windows internals forwards and backwards, but I usually fix the problem regardless and I do it in a way that doesn't cause problems down the road.
I also charge a reasonable rate - which means I'm barely paying my rent. So obviously I'm an idiot.
I charge 25 bucks per hour for home users with a maximum charge of $100 - and usually that means I work a couple hours for free on a spyware cleaning and repair - and 50 bucks per hour for business users. Obviously I could charge a lot more. But there's a lot of competition out there from out of work tech people who also charge low. And despite claims from some people that customers will pay tons of money for computer service, the reality is most people REALLY hate paying anything more than what they paid for the computer in the first place and only get support because they're desperate when the machine is unusable (which is why they can be suckered by the unscrupulous).
Another scam that is very common these days is the "remote maintenance" company, who charges you a tiny amount of money per month and who promises to fix your machine remotely from their systems if you have a problem. I've never figured out how they expect to do that when the machine won't even boot because the hard drive has died or the home router doesn't work or the customer doesn't even have Internet. Sure, this can work with a spyware cleaning - IF the spyware will allow you to remote in or the machine isn't running bone slow because of the spyware. And if you've ever done any remote support over the phone, you know what a painful process that is, especially with a naive user.
There's no substitute for a guy standing in front of the machine who can assess what the customer has done wrong and can help the customer do things right from now on, as well as actually physically seeing what is going on with the machine. I've had several clients call me after the "remote maintenance" company either couldn't fix their problem or screwed things up even worse.
It seems to me things would eventually get better if every grammar school and high school in the country had a basic computer course teaching everyone how to buy a machine, something about the innards, and how to use a machine, including proper computer security, and how to fix the most common problems. I don't know if school systems do that these days, but they should - computer savvy is a basic survival trait these days.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
You're a fucking idiot.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I doubt few here would consider Geek Squad a reputable repair group.
Logic fail. Do you know how to fix everything with your television, car, or any other appliance or gadget in your home?
I whole heartedly disagree. Hard drives and boards in consumer laptops die a lot, and there's not much a user can do to prevent it aside from not using their machines (which completely defeats the purpose of owning one).
when you find out by accident while fixing your friends computer his wife is using a dating site to cheat on him? Then you realize your friend is hiring and meeting up with hookers he met online? The real kicker is they asked me to figure out what website they were going to that was giving them this virus. The install every pop-up people. I told them to stop installing pop-ups and figured they deserved each other and left it at that no need to embarrass anyone let them figure it out on their own and I stopped associating with them figured they were untrustworthy losers.
By most accounts, Geek Squad used to be a class outfit until Best Buy took 'em over; after that, they went downhill fast.
They quoted my father $200 to do a malware cleanup. Unbelievable! (Not sure why he even went there, I've warned him about them before. And yes, he declined the $200 Geek Squad cleanup -- at least he got that right!)
Computer repair is not an equitable business. Everyone loses.
Either the customer gets ripped off by paying high fees OR the company gets ripped off in labour costs. It just isn't worth it.
In business you need to charge out labour at x3 to cover overhead. If it takes 1.5 hours to fix a computer you need to charge 3 * 1.5h * $20/hr = $90.
And almost every task is going to take 1.5 hours.
Go ahead and spend 10 minutes slapping in that memory upgrade or video card and handing it back. When it comes back with the sound or internet not working you're going to get corn-holed. If you don't do any CYA when it comes in or goes out the general rules of thumb is: the last person who isn't retarded gets full responsibility for all current and future computer problems
never worked in a datacentre have you?
I'd contradict you.
I've also lost a PC to simple dead hardware and seen a few friends PC's go in similar ways.
If you limit it to software problems it might be true but lots of problems just happen.
To properly clean and tune a system takes me a day or so. Now I will say that our users (university professors) seem unusually good at spywaring their system and of course it isn't like I spend a ton of my time on it it is "Run utility, go do something else, come back later." Still, takes a good bit of time to run badware scans, defrag, uninstall crap and/or tune startup apps and so on.
Installing RAM? Hell that is 10 minutes at most, and that is only for a case that is a pain to open.
Personally I don't get the drive to be dishonest for these places. Do the job you've been paid to do, do it well, and people will want to use you again and recommend you.
Then again, maybe that is why I have a salaried job doing computer support for a large organization and they work at a small shop. Shit like that would be absolutely NOT tolerated at work and would at best get you fired and maybe criminally charged. We do what we say, we respect your privacy, and we ensure data integrity above all else. To me that doesn't seem special, that seems expected.
About 10% of system builds normally have something wrong or tricky, especially if your building gaming systems or funky intel servers.
I do mostly business consulting now but originally did home business and residential work, the biggest contributor to changing my business model was the plethora of scammers advertising cheap rates. Its really hard to charge a reasonable rate for quality work when the scammers are advertising to fix any virus problem or repair any pc for next to nothing...yes you get what you pay for but often you dont find that out until its too late and the result is the customer doesn't trust any "small business" for that sort of thing and usually goes to something like Geek Squad the next time. The last straw for me was a customer that had called to have me fix a problem that a dodgy repairman had screwed up. After completing the job even though I had explained my rates up front she started complaining about how much higher my rates were than the guy that messed up her computer before.
My office charges for "face time" - time spent actually interacting with a machine. So a complete restore (which we frequently do since we work almost exclusively on business machines and the user's critical stuff is, in theory, stored on the server) that takes us 4-6 hours from top to bottom will probably only be billed for an hour or two, and most of that is going to be spent reinstalling their apps. The 3 hours that it sat there with the "HP is installing your software - please wait" and I worked on another project isn't charged at all.
Am I qualified to be a PC technician? I have no certs (yet) and I majored in English. But I'm amazingly good at figuring things out, and I've been tinkering with computers for over a decade. I've met people with half a dozen certs behind their names that know a fraction of what I do. If nothing else, I can always do my own PC repairs and avoid any of these scams.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
You're right. Despite claims to the contrary, home users REALLY hate paying for computer repair and only do it when they're desperate - which is why their machines are in such a mess when we get to them.
In fact, corporate users don't like it either. For some reason, there's some myth that all these boxes with moving parts in the drives and high heat output are supposed to be "un-breakable" for the five years or more people keep them.
I got one client still running a ten-to-fifteen year old Windows 95 box, for God's sakes! He absolutely will not upgrade that box because it runs a specific software he needs and he doesn't want to learn anything newer. It's already burned out at least one power supply and he lucked out that it didn't fry his motherboard.
And it's not just scammers charging low rates. I charge low rates and don't scam anyone. There's just a ton of people doing PC repair work and the competition is fierce. Add that customers don't like paying a lot per hour and it's hard to justify higher rates, especially for poorer home users. It's a bad business model but poor people need PC support, too, and just can't afford Geek Squad rates.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
OK, after reading the article and then reading the thread here I've concluded that I've had enough. Yes, there is fraud. You get that in every field. It is also not very common as most repair folk would rather make a living--few people I know are out to take you for everything at the expense of their reputation which equals their livelihood. Besides, anyone with specialized knowledge could fraud anyone that doesn't have that knowledge. They could just cheat them. Their prices could be out of line with reality.
Everyone feels at least once that they were not given as good a deal as they think they should have. They feel that way about lawyers, from car repair shops, any type of shop that would repair or upgrade your property, anyone with specialized knowledge. Yeah, and even our government.
What this article does is 1) gives examples of a few of the tricks that some fraudsters pull. Anything from outright fraud to just exaggerating their labor. 2) It then goes on this diatribe about the costs associated with repairs as if they are the ones that are the best judge of the costs associated with parts and labor. Much of the article is about this one guy expressing his unhappiness with what he considers to be a fair cost for repair work. This is, frankly, irrelevant, as setting a cost for your services is not a fraud. Setting a fair price is just good business practice. But hell, look at designer jeans from manufacturer to another. Levi Jeans cost much more than the Walmart store brand. Cost is a matter for the owner of the business, not the judgement of some half-baked tech journalist. Long ago someone said to me that you get paid for what you know, not what you do. So, please, cry me a river if you don't like the charges. You can go elsewhere.
A good company will "estimate" up front what the charges are going to be and approximately how long it will take. Customers have addictions to their computers and they want it all done cheap and done yesterday. Let's get real, neither is likely to happen. Generally, the parts of a computer are worth more than the whole.
Consider a fair cost of around $90 to get an OS re-installed on a netbook that might have cost $250. Adding a replacement HDD plus re-installing the OS on a netbook can come close to the value of the book. You don't really expect the repair technician to sell you the hard drive and then toss the OS install in for free, do you? Re-installing the OS can be a time intensive task. Most netbook manufacturers don't make it easy to remove the old and install the new HDDs (sometimes its even difficult to install RAM in those)--time adds up and time is money. Consider then that on top of that your customer wants you to transfer the data from that old defective HDD to the new one--how much labor is involved in trying to get it to be recognized by the OS (clicking, missing partitions, etc), to access the files, to copy those files to an intermediary device and then back onto the new install). Do you really think that it is out of line to have costs nearing the original cost of the netbook? You bought cheap. Don't expect the technician to fix it cheap due to your cheapness.
The technician needs to be clear on what is going to happen. Try to explain it to the customer. The problem is that the customer is often a closed mind. They don't want to hear an explanation. They just want it working again. How many times have I tried to explain to my customers precisely why their computer is slow (they are running XP and have 256mb of RAM and have all the updates done from Microsoft along with a slew of other software products that load at start up eating away at valuable resources). Or try to explain to them that their HDD is failing. That the diagnosis indicates the drive has tons of bad sectors and they screwed up their computer because they had viruses, bad sectors, and they tried to defragment it. Or explain that their nephew wiped out their hard drive by installing a version of Vista that they didn't have a license f
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
people are constantly coming to me and asking me how their computer could possible break. It's a machine, like any other. They don't last for ever. Caps Pop, hard drives wear out, cooling & heating breaks circuit board connections to RAM, shit happens. But they just don't believe it. Gotta be a virus, right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I didn't reply earlier, because I knew you'd get your ass reamed quite nicely. It looks like they're not done with you yet either.
Just know: when you're lying there bleeding, battered, and broken, I'll show up to begin my fun.
Why don't people just shell out the extra 20-30% on a software + hardware warranty.
We were halfway there with the first iMac. Putting in more memory was a matter of using a coin to open a little hatch and then putting the memory right into the slots underneath. Apple since moved to designs where it isn't so simple and PCs are not so instantly obvious.
Personally I think high schools should allocate an afternoon to simple PC construction. With onboard video etc it's easier to put a machine together than flat pack furniture but people assume it is hard without even looking at a manual. Cure that assumption and we'll see less people getting ripped off.
I have an uncle like that. He actually did fix some cardiac monitoring equipment with a nurses hairclip. On the other hand he is retired after a long career in electrical engineering and his hobby is learning how to fix everything he has in his home. I can't even fix my car - I could fix a 1980s car but not this one.
At least all they did was pretend to put in more, I've seen Rent a Ripoff actually steal RAM out of the PC when they brought it in for cleaning. And all these "if you don't know X" are so damned full of shit! Do you know how to rebuild your engine? Then you shouldn't be driving! Can you operate on your legs if you break them? Then you shouldn't be walking!
Dumbasses nobody can know everything and that is why we have mechanics, plumbers, and yes repairguys like me. I am proud to say I have NEVER copied someone's files, stolen a damned thing, or not done any job I wasn't told to do. I don't use hot software (although I will admit I use Windows copies and not originals, I use the correct key for the machine) I don't go looking for pics of your GF, I just do my job.
The moral of the story is the same as with mechanics and plumbers ask around and you'll find out if they are honest or not. I'd be happy to give them the name of a couple of my business clients if they want to know about my work, or hell just walk into their place of business. See all those whiteboxes? Guess who built them. I design the machine for the job required, which is why the printer has middle of the road CPUs (AMD Triples) but 4Gb of RAM and 1Gb of RAM on the GPU, because it helps with those large banners they are always doing. The local engineer has only 2Gb of RAM but a fast CPU because the engineering program he runs doesn't use much RAM but slams the hell out of a processor.
So just ask around folks. You wouldn't take your car to "Crazy Joe's house of repair" just because he has a snazzy commercial would you? And please for the love of all that is good QUIT GOING TO WORST BUY! Because I swear I've had to fix more horribly broken shit from them than from any other shop! So just ask around, an honest fixit guy is more than happy to give you references of past customers.Hell I'll even take before and after pics and screenshots if that is what makes you happy, I'm damned proud of my work, thank you VERY much! I'm not the cheapest guy in town, but I'm honest, fair, and you get what you pay for.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yup. Anything broken that costs less than $1000 new should probably be put on a ship to a country with cheap labor.
/. looks great to me in Win 7 with Chrome.
Maybe you should take your computer to the GeekSquad.
Please leave your geek card on your way out.
8)
(stolen from DaBum) I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
Watch out for Asrock boards! I had a devil of a time with those bastards, it turned out by default their boards are so "OC friendly" that they don't detect for shit! Also the ones I got ran about a third of a volt too hot so any autodetect would set everything WRONG. I finally had to go into the BIOS and set every damned thing manually like we used to on the old 486s, what a PITA.
As for horror stories? How about standing in a shop talking to the clerk when the front door explodes and you suddenly have an M16 in your face! I was like "Don't shoot, just gonna get my card, just here to pick up some parts, okay?" It turned out the reason this shop was constantly undercutting the one I worked for was they were fencing boxes from other states and were also cranking hot sat boxes with de-scramblers, counterfiet Windows and Adobe software, you name it. I have to admit their Win98 and Win2K copies were spot on when the fed showed it to me. The XP hologram was a little iffy.
Oh and the funniest part? The local cops didn't like our prices so took it to him and when he got wind the feds were onto him he sold the cops boxes out from under them! Ha! that is what you get for being cheapskates!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
staples easy tech is just high pressure sales with real techs forced out.
The thing is at stapes you better sell.
http://paulrepair.blogspot.com/2009/04/stay-away-from-staples-for-computer.html
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/staples-c276403.html
http://consumerist.com/2008/03/staples-tries-to-charge-senior-citizen-390-for-basic-computer-repair.html
http://consumerist.com/2008/09/why-i-quit-staples-easy-tech.html
http://consumerist.com/2009/12/i-always-look-forward-to.html
I did CompUSA repair work in the late 90's - in fact it was my first tech job so in some respects I'm grateful for it and in others I'm not - This was back in the day when top of the line HD's were 8.4 gigs and memory was sold behind the counter
We always ran an above the board shop but let's face it - that goes from manager to manager - a lot of our guys (myself included) were just young people though we had an antique or two around to fix Apples and Printers -
some of the issues we saw were Operating issues - this got to be a major headache - format/reinstall is what we eventually ended up doing across the board - we can't fix OS problems like that
Viruses were horrible but at the time, most were bootable from floppy and most boot floppies cleaned them out - those were the good ol' days
we would occasionally get some folks wanting to upgrade and we'd often point them to the refurbished computers because to upgrade a 486 to a top of the line pentium would after install fees, cost less then buying a new pc - (kinda still holds true today actually)
we'd have people wanting free advice, drivers, help - we'd do what we could but at the end of the day you can only do so much over the phone - so much of the work was diagnostic/detective work with no easy 1 spot fix...
and we had some fun stories - like the PC that came in for repair with the gay porn desktop wallpaper - which then showed out thru the window of the shop into the main store for a couple minutes before he came back to the pc - and the wife who returned a PC in the AM only to have the husband want the same PC back (with no data lost) that evening - (yep, full of porn, which in dial up days took time to acquire)
my favorite is a virus infected and OS damaged custom built beast our master tech worked on for two days - two weeks later the guy came back complaining of the same issues - we asked if he had done anything to the pc and he pointed out that to get his data back, he restored from the tape backup he made 3 weeks ago - DOH!
I could see where mom and pop shops in the strip malls might be angling for a quick buck, but never saw horror stories like that at my shop
RB
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I lot of computer people have a hard time charging for services. It is just so natural and easy for us to fix some problems that we feel bad charging for it. It took me a long time to get in the mind set that my time was worth money and to ask people to pay me. I pay repair men a lot for all kinds of work that I cannot or will not do my self. Plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and even lawn care providers.
I was paying someone $54 a few times a year to fertilize my yard. They would pull up with a truck and a long hose and just spray the yard down. They were in and out in about 10 minutes. When my yard was over ran with weeds, I could justify it. I found that it was cheaper and not all that much work for me to do it myself. I still over pay for someone to change my oil and rotate my tires.
Once I decided that I was done with part time home repair work, I used my prices to drive away work. I would charge higher and higher prices and would be very up front with them. I even had a minimum charge of one hour. I was surprised at how much people were willing to pay. I eventually moved away from the area and was able to call it quits.
My girlfriend's laptop was not booting. In fact, I could not get into BIOS setup so booting from an alternative medium was not an option. The simple things I tried (remove DIMM, remove HDD, reset CMOS, ...) didn't worked. I am a software guy so I figured out that my time was too expensive to continue the investigation and that we'll pay some "professional". Geek Squad was conveniently located so I brought it there. I was really stupid that I have not read their reviews before that.
They asked nearly $100 for a "diagnostic" that looked something like this:
"No signal from keyboard" - read: F1 won't enter BIOS setup (that was why we brought the laptop to them in the first place)
"No signal from CD ROM" - read: our diagnostic CD doesn't boot (again, that was why we brought the laptop to them)
"Hard Drive OK" - strange, we removed HDD before giving the laptop to them
"RAM OK" - the only thing they have done with the laptop was trying another DIMM (if they were not lying on that one too)
"Motherboard error" - they implied that exchanging it would be too expensive and the laptop is not worth repairing.
(BTW I was able to fix the laptop with some help of Google afterward. The problem was short-circuited wires in a broken USB slot. The laptop still works well 1 yr after the "incident".)
I was furious so I spent really long time arguing with them. They repeated several times that they ran "series of diagnostic test" but when I pressed the manager he had to admit that they couldn't run the tests because they couldn't boot their diagnostic CD. At that point, the manager denied they lied to me about the "series of diagnostics" and started calling his technician (who was not there at that point) "a mysterious man who told you something".
My girlfriend never seen her money again. I filled a complaint at their corporate support line. They told me they will handle it but they will not tell me about the outcome (WTF?). All I could do was to call again the next day to check that the complain was in their system and it had assigned a tracking id.
I was seriously considering taking some further steps because I consider this preying on a layman public bordering with a fraud. But at the end I just gave up.
So you fix your own car, bones, eyes, appliances, house, whatever when they have a problem? Oh, and the breakages are all *your* fault, right?
Don't worry. You are pathetically typical of geek morality these days. PPeople who lack knowledge of ANYTHING *deserves* to be ripped off when they need help repairing that thing.
Fuck you, geek filth.
ugh, malware.
I would have no problem quoting someone $200 for a maleware cleanup. Best case its a fresh infection and whatever automated tool you run will clean it up or its a google search away. If that's the case, then you over estimated and only charge $60-$100. Worst case its years of infections that finally broke the computer on a 4 year old computer with too little ram that wont boot from USB.
This stuff is like cancer. Not to bad if you catch it early, but once it spreads you never know if you got it all.
Once I decided that I was done with part time home repair work, I used my prices to drive away work. I would charge higher and higher prices and would be very up front with them. I even had a minimum charge of one hour. I was surprised at how much people were willing to pay. I eventually moved away from the area and was able to call it quits.
Because they're past the "risk premium". They can get some other guy and end up with someone that doesn't know shit or spends forever and bills it or just makes a mess of things or is a plain old scam. If they give this work to you, and know you'll deliver quality work with no fuzz then you are the safe, simple option. Consider it a bit like hiring a plumber, even if it a week later springs a leak and he does immediately take full responsibility (we're well into fairytale land here already) you still have to deal with the leak, damage assessment, insurance agency, repairs and all that paperwork and phone calls and shit. All the time stolen is rarely covered. Or you could call the guy who charges more but does it right. That relationship is strongly personal though, it won't do to send your hireling replacement.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Piffle. Every hardware failure I've had in 30 years of computing has been just something up and dying for no apparent reason other than old age. Hardware fails. It ages, even things without moving parts. That's a fact of life with anything.
Professionally, I work in a field where the hardware I design needs to be available with rates approaching 99.99% for years, so we have to do MTBF abnalysis involving every component and, yes, every component has a MTBF rating. It's basically impossible to meet rates like that for those spans for a single circuitboard, so so we design in redundancy and, as a fundamental part of the design, make replacing a failed unit with a spare take less than a minute in the field. A chassis with a backplane and hot swap capability helps here.
I knew a guy in college who got a new job when he sent his computer in for repair. They liked his resume. He was a Computer Science major and got an interview followed by a job offer after he picked up the computer.
Kriston
I install Linux for free, or $50/hr to clean windows out and still have to do a reinstall that they'll be back in six months for all the 'clicking on pop-ups" problems.
If you're not a pulmonologist, stop breathing.
When anyone suggests that some personal responsibility is appropriate, it's very easy to demagogue them. It's particularly easy when they say it in an abrasive, absolute, "why doesn't everyone see it" sort of way. Then it's like an cheap slam-dunk one-line victory, isn't it?
GP is going about this the wrong way. I don't precisely agree with his absolute stance. Yet my point is similar in nature to his, but you will find it more difficult to deny. Simply put, if you spend hundreds of dollars on a machine and then refuse to learn the very most basic things about it, you are placing yourself completely at the mercy of others. To know what a stick of RAM looks like, to read a little sticker and see that it says "2GB" and not "4GB" is hardly a strain of one's technical prowess. It merely requires that you bother to spend a few minutes reading some very basic, entry-level literature written specifically for beginners.
I'm not sure if it's due to functional illiteracy or an inability to handle a contrary position without getting overly emotional, or what, but a lot of people would read the paragraph above and swear on all that is sacred that I am saying it's somehow okay for these shops to prey on people and rip them off. I didn't say that. What I am saying is that placing yourself completely at the mercy of total strangers, strangers who stand to profit from your ignorance, when it's so easy not to, is a great way to get a result you won't like. Those who choose not to do this generally don't end up getting ripped off.
The way this works is simple: there are bad people in the world. They do bad things; for example they overcharge and they rip people off. There's nothing you can do about that. There have always been people like this, since ancient times, and in the foreseeable future there always will be. What you can decide is whether you will be the low-hanging fruit that they target. If it took long years of training to acquire extreme expertise, then I would have fully agreed with your one-liner. To avoid almost every scam listed in that article, all it takes is a natural curiosity and a willingness to spend a few minutes here and there learning about that machine you purchased.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
To the point that I fix computers out of pity, not out of income.
You're any ass.
That's high, I guess, but I agreed to clean up the laptop of a wife of a best friend, and that shit took six to eight hours to finally set right. They took me to dinner, at least.
And then she manages to infect it with malware again *days* later by doing one of the very things I told her not to do!
Ah well. I got lunch *and* dinner out of that. I told my friend if she does it a third time the price will involved a period of indentured servitude.
Then they got matching Macbooks. No problems since. ;-)
I have never interacted with BB/GS except to fix a machine they "repaired".
A real PC repair professional will do the following:
1: Provide a detailed description of what they did. If a tech removes the power supply to hose it out with canned air, and reinstalls this, it should be noted, just in case a wire got loose.
2: Discretion. Being asked to repair a PC doesn't mean one gets carte blanche to do a forensics investigation and look at any picture present. Neither does it mean that the info the client has is fair game to stick on the site of chance.
3: Basic honesty. For almost all home users, MSE is good enough. Getting a commercial AV solution is pointless because most infections end up being 0-day variants that AV products will not catch. Instead, educating the end user on Adblock and sandboxie will go a lot further to prevent calls in the future about infected machines. The $50-$100 that a user would spend on an AV solution can go for an external hard drive (which actually has a tangible benefit to the user) for nightly backups.
4: Common sense. The average security schlock states to use AV software, don't run executables. However, few of these guys actually put any emphasis on something actually important, and that are backups. Most users' needs can be met by an external hard disk, a relevant backup utility [1], and Mozy/Carbonite/Blackblaze for documents. It almost is a mind-blower why users are not taught backup 101. With a decent backup utility, one's RTO is the time it takes to put in a recovery CD, partition the drive, click "restore volume", the backup program restore, and the reboot back into the restore system. If one has a real time copy utility, one's RPO is almost real time with documents.
The problem is that most "computer repairmen" have no clue what professionalism is. I know people who just can't find anyone they trust, so if they start getting computer problems, they just throw away their old machine and buy something new, rather than pay some guy hundreds of dollars to do nothing, except perhaps try some half-ass job of installing Norton Antivirus.
[1]: It would be nice if MS had a standardized utility like NTbackup (which was the main OS utility up to XP/2003). However, Vista and W7 ship with widely varying features in their OS backup utilities depending on edition. So, I get people to get a third party utility like Retrospect, TrueImage, or NetBackup if using Windows. Most needs for backups on Macs can be met by Time Machine, and UNIX has a slew of useful utilities.
A couple of days ago, I think my laptop got overheated. It shut down automatically a few times and then failed to restart dying almost as soon as I restarted it. So I said what the hell, I've never seen this. I'll let Windows try to repair itself. It warned me it may take a few minutes. You can't cancel this operation either. 20 minutes later it said "Sorry, Bill Gates is an asshole". Okay, it didn't quit say that but it did fail to do anything. Then it died 2 minutes later. I sprayed compressed air all over it, and jacked it up with wine corks to give it some air underneath, turned on the ceiling fan and it's been fine ever since. Thanks a lot Toshiba. Your laptop sucks!
And all these "if you don't know X" are so damned full of shit! Do you know how to rebuild your engine? Then you shouldn't be driving! Can you operate on your legs if you break them? Then you shouldn't be walking!
Dumbasses nobody can know everything
I'd say you're the one full of it. Knowing how to check your RAM isn't like knowing how to rebuild your car engine. If we want to stick with a car analogy, I'd say it's more like opening up the hood of your car and being able to tell if the mechanic made off with your engine. Which if you don't know how to do that, yes, you prolly shouldn't own a car.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
More like "Don't drive if you don't know how not to crash"
Sucks to be the person who knows how not to crash but ends up getting hit by someone who had their very first seizure. Or had a sinkhole open up beneath them. Or hit a couple of large nails that dropped off a truck while on the freeway.
Maybe they have to charge $200 to stay in business... you know kinda like a plumber charges you $200 to unclog your toilet. There is a reason for this, if they could not charge these prices there would be no computer repair men or plumbers for that matter. If you find it so expensive, you clean your dad's pc this week, and the following week, and every week after that cause you know he'll get more.
Pretty much this.
I used to go around and fix people's computers back when I was a kid (in the Bad Old Days of mostly Windows 95/98) before I was old enough to get a "real" job. The problem was and is, anything and everything that happened to that particular user's computer from the time you touched it until eternity automatically becomes "YOUR FAULT!" and good luck arguing with some clueless boob about it when you're only a 14 year old kid. I had one guy start threatening to sue me and everything. No, he didn't succeed -- or actually file the paperwork. But you get the idea. His problem? Something like a year after I fixed some simple Windows configuration problems on his PC, his DSL stopped working because he quit paying his bill. Obviously, I "hacked" his computer. A year prior. Right.
The sad fact is, most users are clueless, helpless, and hopeless. They don't understand and refuse to learn to understand how personal computers work in general, and just lash out with all kinds of hairbrained emotions and responses when things stop going their way.
The ones that really burn me up are the ones that don't listen, and then start sticking their fingers in your face when the inevitable "I told you so" moment comes up. Like one lady for whom I reinstalled Windows about four times for... The first time she didn't have any backups, and she lost her restore CD. So I extricated her precious data, ordered a new restore CD, and reinstalled without losing anything. The second time she didn't have any new backups, lost her new restore CD, and lost the disk of previous backups I made for her. Repeat this process two more times over the course of about three months. And yes, she kept infecting herself with the same virus by clicking on the same popup ads (those fake warning ones) because she continued using IE instead of Firefox with Adblock I installed for her, even though I told her not to use IE and deleted all of her IE icons. Repeatedly! Fifth time, I declined the job. Her data loss became "YOUR FAULT!" Are we sensing the pattern?
I've got a new policy: I don't mess with anyone's PC except for close friends and family, and luckily MOST of those people are either smart enough to do their own repairs, or smart enough to admit when they're in over their heads, and anything I might have to inflict on their PC will be an honest attempt and not a magical guarantee... Especially in regards to data recovery.
Are they full of shit because they infuriate you? Because of the smugness and certainty with which most of them say it? Because there's actually a small kernel of truth to it and that just pisses you off even more? I'm starting to wonder if the habitual urge to cherry-pick extremes is the root of all misunderstanding.
This wasn't a story about the ability to build computers or other electronics. This car analogy is not a comparison of two similar themes. You're making an analogy between users who don't notice RAM that's suddenly missing (requires basic technical knowledge) and the mechanical skill it takes to rebuild a modern car engine (requires advanced mechanical and technical knowledge). That isn't instructive or edifying; it's misleading though it's an easy mistake to make.
I'd answer it by saying I wouldn't know how to rebuild my car's engine, but if a repair shop removed it and replaced it with a significantly inferior engine without telling me, I would notice. I think that's a fair analogy to removing a stick of RAM.
I wouldn't know how to properly set a broken bone. But I would know that the leg is broken. If I ask the doctor to do something about my broken leg I do not expect him to also put a cast on my uninjured arm.
In this entire discussion, I haven't seen a single person dispute that. If you assume there is no balance, no sense of what is reasonable behind what they believe, then I suppose some have displayed a perspective that could go in that direction -- if taken to an absurd extreme that few or none would actually believe and advocate.
It's a matter of having integrity. There's a non-technical skill which would have been handy for those targeted by this kind of fraud: the ability to recognize sincerity, to distinguish it from the perfunctory, from the approval-seeking and the phony making-nice which is so much more common.
A person with real integrity is not simply making a choice not to copy someone's files, steal, pad the bill, etc. It's more like they don't even find that tempting. Those who think it's about adherence to a list of rules don't really get it. It's more like what Aristotle said: "I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law."
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Stories of unscrupulous and incompetent people make me fix computers for free. All family members, friends, employees, and ex-employees on good terms get free computer repair. They pay for parts and carry the box to my door/office and I will fix it quickly. I usually get a batch of cookies, cash, or a live chicken in payment, and it is worth it to know they are using a clean system that has reliable antivirus on it (Security essentials and Malwarebytes). I hope I am stealing business away from Best Buy and the Genius bar.
I agree 100% with this statement.
If you are a professional, you should conduct yourself as one, and be expected by your customers, that you will conduct yourself as one.
A professional adheres to best practices of business. Honesty, discretion and common sense.
Although a professional should also be expected to be law abiding, it does not make them a forensics expert to report to the authorities if they find something on a customer's computer that may or may not be illegal, or morally objectionable. When a professional is working on a customer's computer, they should not be looking through their personal information or data files. And if, during the normal execution of their duties of repair, happen to come across something that is illegal or morally objectionable, they should ignore it and move on. Computer professionals are not duly deputized law enforcement agents and shouldn't be.
If, perchance, law enforcement happens to contact a computer professional asking questions about a customer or the contents of their computer(s), they should use proper discretion and contact their lawyer for advise on how to respond. If they are provided a subpoena or a search warrant, they should also contact their lawyer to aid them in dealing with it in a professional manner.
After reading many of these comments, I've come to one conclusion: Windows is basically a scam, with all its vulnerabilities, and others are just piling their scam on top of the basic scam. Then there are the software companies that follow the Windows model (releasing software that still has zero-day defects) and they just make it worse. Add the antivirus companies that can't remove all the viruses and it's just a big mess. It sounds like the corporation where the accountant is stealing from the company because he knows the company is ripping off its customers. Once there is a pattern of misbehavior, you either are very tempted to participate yourself or you find another career and no longer play with the scammers.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
The funny thing is that Geek Squad does all of these things.
P.T. Barnum underestimated the birth rate.
was when I was called out to a new client's residence after a certain "Nerd" had installed a WiFi setup for the customer's laptop, to find that not only had they improperly installed the CardBus WiFi card drivers -- but that the laptop already had built-in WiFi (that had been disabled in the BIOS)! I can understand honest mistakes (I made more than a few in my day) but... yeah. Selling people hardware they don't need because they already have it could easily be added to that list of mortal sins...
all it takes is a natural curiosity and a willingness to spend a few minutes here and there learning
I am in full agreement with your whole post.
The problem is that most people (well, the vast majority of Americans, and probably UKers, too, and Asians for that matter, what with the "rice bowl" and "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down") are not naturally curious.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
$20/hour.
Fuck, a construction crew I've been working with on our office charges $45/hour per person for skilled labor, $20/hour for menial labor.
Electrician $65/hour.
Plumber $85/hour.
$54 is actually pretty cheap for that sort of service. It does depend a bit on how many houses they're able to do, but it's unlikely that they can do more than 2 an hour, unless they're all fairly close together. Even paying the workers minimum wage, you're still probably talking not much less than that for labor alone, not to mention the costs of providing that labor, the equipment and supplies and whatnot.
Back around the time the Mac II came out, I took one into Sears for repairs. They called me a couple of days later and told me it was ready, and when I got there, I found out that they had cannibalized it for parts, and they said they couldn't get it to me for another week.
I sent Apple a letter about it, and got an apology signed by John Sculley. I don't know if there were any repercussions for Sears.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Never a data center, no, but I do handle a lot of PCs from friends and family(yes, I'm the computer guy), besides my own builds. With that information in place, I'll rephrase - 90% of broken computers(hardware/software) within their lifespan, that I have worked on are from operator error. From the five contradictions I've received thus far, I suppose I am to assume that my case is unique, and drop my point.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
ugh, malware.
I would have no problem quoting someone $200 for a maleware cleanup.
Yeah, maleware can be bad, but sometimes femaleware can be even worse! ;)
To
I usually do. Doesn't everybody? If time permits I do all my electrical, plumbing, drywall, car repair, refrigerator repair, etc... I soldered new capacitors in my Phillips DVD player when they blew. I put brakes on my car but I take the rotors in to be turned because I lack the equipment. I rebuilt the carburetor on my motorcycle when it needed new pin valves. I've replaced head gaskets in cars. I spent a summer welding as a teenager. Once I rebuilt a transmission. These days I get paid way too much setting up ERP systems to waste my time doing most of those things so I have other people do them for me. I am actually wary of people who do not know how to do these things, like doctors and lawyers. They're supposed to be smart!
I seriously doubt that the feds used a breaching charge while serving a warrant on a business. There is a ton of paperwork and liability involved in that.
I used to live in a place that had two computer shops. ONLY TWO. If you wanted something done right you did it yourself, or you got ripped off by them. One of them intentionally sabotaged the hardware so that it would keep coming back (grounding a certain pin on the keyboard controller to some other location.) The other one would steal the good parts out of the system and replace it with their worthless stock.
Times have changed, you'd certainly notice if the video card was swapped with a worse model, provided you actually play a game once in a while, but back then, the old ISA cards meant the difference between 256 colors and 16 million colors.
Anyhoo... the common denominator is usually the stores hire children/work-experience from the local high school, and they are only allowed to diagnose X or Y problems, nothing that actually requires thinking. There are some smart kiddies out there, but they don't work for the stores, no they're the ones that you have to know-someone-who-knows-someone. The ones that are working at the store under work experience, are only their to be exploited.
If you really want your system to be repaired properly, get no less than 3 quotes, or buy the factory extended warranty and avoid the shops altogether. Don't bother with the store's product service plan, that is absolutely a rip off for all but the worst grade equipment. These stores (eg best buy) know better, but still sell high-margin-low-quality machines from the asian manufacturers, and the techs aren't allowed to tell customers not to buy the shitty machines since that loses a sale.
I Moved to LA, so my parents called the local "Nerds on Call" for computer help. I looked over the invoice when I was visiting recently. These fucks charged 20 bucks for a fan, 20 bucks for a fan install, 50 bucks for a hard drive install (Just labor, no parts) and $180 for OS reinstall.
Years back I was a auto mechanic for a few years and a rather good one at that. I actually worked for one small reputable shop every other one where complete sharks. I did not last long at the shark companies they flat out ripped of people on nearly every singe job.
Had a boss one time that said hey what did you find?
I told him it was nothing but a bad plug wire which it was. He said nonsense hook the car to the sniffer and I will be right over. He walked over and told me to start the car and pump the gas 6-8 times. Dude presses print on the analyzer as the co shoots off the charts from the accelerator pump dumping fuel in. He marches the print over to the customer and sells her wires, full tune up, carb rebuild and a laundry list of other stuff it did not need.
Engine diagnostics 100$ yep nothing but a paper clip jumper and turn the key to accessory and read the flashes. MAF sensors where awesome, guy says it stumbles sometimes, open the hood rap on the maf sensor with my knuckles, yep stumbles. That is a 15 sec test that is costing a $100 for diagnostics.
Oh and I was paid computer time, computer says it takes 2 hrs to do a brake job. I was so quick I could knock out a 4 wheel brake job in under 15 minutes, you still pay 2 hrs.
Then there is the shops that pay mechanics a 20% commission on parts, like taking candy from a baby.
They also love to advertise systems as being on-sale, but when you get to the store all the unsealed ones are already gone so they will offer you one that has had the Geek Squad "optimizations" done to it, for a hefty price increase. I do not even see how this is legal under bait-and-switch laws.
Maybe they have to charge $200 to stay in business... you know kinda like a plumber charges you $200 to unclog your toilet.
Yeah, or you could be smart and just go buy a drain snake for under $30. They're good for more than just your toilet too.
I used to work in the computer repair shop in college.
Let's just say that our shop computers had the most complete MP3 collection you'll ever see.
3: Basic honesty. For almost all home users, MSE is good enough. Getting a commercial AV solution is pointless because most infections end up being 0-day variants that AV products will not catch. Instead, educating the end user on Adblock and sandboxie will go a lot further to prevent calls in the future about infected machines. The $50-$100 that a user would spend on an AV solution can go for an external hard drive (which actually has a tangible benefit to the user) for nightly backups.
And that's the reason why there are very few real "PC repair professional"... Free (price not GNU) AV software DOESNT PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE!
4: Common sense.
This, there is also very little of. But unlike free AV software, the lack of common sense does put food on the table.
That, that really grinds my gears!
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/367345/confessions-of-a-computer-repairman/print (will prompt to print though).
Bah to three pages. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Look, good computer repair people, will NOT want to fix your computer. They'll be busy, know what a hassle it is, try to avoid it.
Fake/crappy/untrustworthy repair people will be happy to fix you computer, since they aren't going to do too much and collect money.
and yes, this sounds like a joke, but it's not.
Be seeing you...
You don't work in the business, do you?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
This article comes from those shady UK people. And who's going to trust those "cheeky" fellows?
When I read the part about the door being kicked in I didn't interpret explode literally. More like an action packed word implying kicked in or flying open.
Example: Crashing down the tree branch landed upon the ground.
It's sounds more exciting than falling. I see how the poster's sentence could be interpreted as a breach charge after reading your reply but I think the word choice is appropriate for the telling of an entertaining tale fiction or not.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Buy no computer for more than 250 -300Euro (laptops). I made good experiences with refurbished X2x/X4x thinkpads or cheap netbooks, which lasted a few years in average. When buying a computer make sure the hd is easily replacable, replace it by a new one. When its broken, remove the hd and throw away the rest. Dont buy support packs, these are ripoffs. Have done it once, and decided my time is too valuable to go to the procedures for getting a problem not fixed despite staying on the phone for 5 hours.
An ethical computer repair person would never have to worry about child porn on a clients computer, because they would never look over the clients files. I'm not advocating child porn, but I've never searched through the personal files of a clients PC and felt good about it. I hate it when I have to browse their info at all. I've been asked by minions more than once what they should do when they've found questionable material. My suggestion was that they should not have been browsing that information in the first place, but now that they think they've found something, they should follow their conscience. You should never ever have to do this as a professional. It's certainly outside the scope of works...and you should not have been looking over the clients files anyway...you idiot.
You'll find vulnerable and ignorant people everywhere. Wasn't it the Americans who came up with the expression "snake oil salesman"?
I've had problems recently with Sony.
I have a Vaio Z. Nice bit of kit. The fan began to die - getting very loud. I took the SSD out (for data privacy) and sent the laptop off for repair. The fan is replaced. Sony also indicate they have updated the BIOS.
I get the laptop back, put the SSD back in... ...and Windows is SCREWED.
Doesn't recognize the display, can't find the audio chipset, power management software thinks there's an optical drive attached. Oh and my 3G SIM which was in the motherboard has gone. Performance when running a game is now juddery (run - slight pause - run - slight pause) and I get abrupt lock ups about once every two or three days.
Now, you tell me how a fan and BIOS change causes this? I think they changed the motherboard, because the fan is pretty integral to the motherboard; and Windows Does Not Like having the motherboard changed under it.
Sony customer support has been worse than useless. I would have been better if I had never emailed them - I would be up the time I've wasted.
Their response was, I kid you not, "in this situation we recommend you reinstall Windows".
I wanted to get them to check was if the motherboard was actually changed. I couldn't get them to actually *acknowledge that question*. It was flat out ignored.
Just beyond the pale.
I'll warrant that most people (if not all people on ./) probably would never need a computer repair tech to fix a computer. Sure I get that.
My question becomes why does the majority feel that people should work for free or peanuts? Put another way: why should individuals or groups who don't know how to do task or can't be bothered to learn a task be entitled to free service?
First, since a "service" is mostly an intangible, if I look at a computer for free and then inform a victim (not to be snarky) of exactly whats wrong with their computer (or any other product) and then tell them how much it will cost to get it fixed; I am asking for that customer to take their computer back, say thank you, and go to Joe Fixit (another competitor) down the block, with the required information needed to explain the problem and hammer down the cost of repair. Do this enough times and it does not even make sense to stay in business. Additionally, time is money, so for taking time out to look at the client's computer should compensate me for my time used.
I could go on all day with this, but the bottom line is that: if one is ignorant and requires help (and it is not a life-threating situation), they should pay for it, or go purchase a book (or go to a class) and sweat through learning the intricacies of how to fix their problem.
Regards,
MBC1977,
has this same problem. The best way to fight it is with knowledge.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Allow me to agree and disagree. yes to being a pro, and I have never EVER looked at someone's files (I go so far as to tell them if they want me to back up their files they should be aware I may see file names during the backup so please don't be asking me to back up funky files) but as far as MSE? Meh.
It is great if you already know what you are doing and aren't going to any dodgy sites, but home users? Avast free is a better choice, as it has web shield which scans pages before they load and will strip out nasty scripts like drive bys, has P2P and messenger protection, all in all I'd say it is a better AV and with both being 100% free (I'd never give a customer trialware crap) why not use the better solution?
As far as NTBackup? If you want built in Windows 7 imaging backup is fine, personally I prefer to give my customers the free Paragon backup and recovery. Its solid, its free, it is reliable, it gives you a live CD option if the machine ever gets borked beyond booting, and if the customer has a USB HDD I'm happy to set it up to backup to it so they don't have to worry about HDD failures.
I used to have this argument with my former boss all the time. he was one of those "give them just enough rope" types, that wouldn't patch it, no AV, just clean it, so they'd get boned later and have to pay him again, whereas I believe I've done my job if the ONLY reason they have to come to me is they want to upgrade the hardware. I give them either Dragon or Firefox for a browser, put in ABP so they don't get ads (which are a big source of infection) give them a full AV, I even ask if they'd like the "full package" at no extra charge and if they say yes they get the latest Flash, Klite codec so they can play any format, and Libre Office so they can edit word docs, and a PDF reader (Foxit) along with a PDF printer so they can easily save files offline without printing. Thanks to Ninite it takes no real time from me and gives them a nicer PC
Between that and Comodo time machine which lets them just push F11 if they ever screw up the boot to restore from there, otherwise they can restore straight from Windows, makes it pretty damned hard to screw up a machine that I fixed. Sure I don't see these people again hardly ever, but I get enough referrals from their friends and family they send by to make the extra effort worth it. I'm quite proud to say many of my builds from a decade ago are still going, they just get passed down through the family as they age. Like I tell my new build customers "My machines won't be as cheap as a Dell, but you know what? MY machine will keep going past the warranty period." Just take pride in your work, treat folks right, and you'll get a good rep and with that comes the work.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Computer repair is not an equitable business. Everyone loses.
Either the customer gets ripped off by paying high fees OR the company gets ripped off in labour costs. It just isn't worth it.
In business you need to charge out labour at x3 to cover overhead. If it takes 1.5 hours to fix a computer you need to charge 3 * 1.5h * $20/hr = $90.
Yeah, but put ten computers in a row on a bench and fix them all a the same time and it does not take much longer. Clicking OK takes a moment, its the waiting in-between that takes time.
Of course it does, assbag. Basic economics fail. If you use free software, you make your money another way. In this example, you are charging for the service. You know what the word "repair" means, right? What the fuck does being a PC repair professional have to do with selling AV software? Dumb ass.
45/3 = $15
65/3 = $22
85/3 = $28/hr
Now you know how much the workers get paid. Welcome to business.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Thank you. I don't know why in the hell the guy would think "breaching charge" because I thought I was pretty clear when I said explode it was like "Blam!"as they slammed the door open and suddenly there are a dozen feds in full body armor and helmets with M16s right in my face. I thought the poor kid behind the counter was gonna piss himself.
The funny part was the lead fed was actually annoyed at first that I wasn't sitting there shaking in my boots. I told him "I used to play three nights a week behind chicken wire. You do that for 6 months and you'll find you just don't startle easily anymore." But once he saw my card and saw I wasn't gonna act like an asshole or smart mouth him he was actually really decent about the whole thing. He let me stand there and watch them load up the gear, let me check out one of the counterfeit boxes of each version (like I said the Win98 and Win2K were spot on, I'd have never known, the hologram on XP was iffy though) and was even nice enough to tell me that there was gonna be a police auction of one of his partners (my boss ended up with a trailer load of nice parts and PCs they'd been using for their operation) and all and all was pretty decent about the whole thing. Just not the way one would expect to spend a Tuesday you know?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
FWIW, I've owned a computer repair shop for 16 years. We charge a FLAT RATE of $85.00 plus parts. If the repair takes just a few minutes, there is no charge. This includes the process of cleaning malware from the computer over and over again and sticking with the computer until we find a solution. The VERY LAST think we ever do it a wipe-and-reload. Yes, that's the easy way but suck for the client. In short, we work on a client's computer just as we would work on our own. Typical turn-around time is 24 hours.
How do we make money charging a flat $85.00 fee? Well, we enjoy a very good reputation so I have one or two technicians working on 10 computers at a time. His day is spent rotating from one computer to the next all day long. And we LOVE it. 10 computer per day at 85 a pop (plus parts) will buy a lot of beer. I'm opening up a second shop in a couple fo weeks then will cover the state of Alabama assuming that goes well.
Bottom line is treat your customer they way you'd want to be treated and your road will be paved with gold. I am thankful for the scammers and incompent people such as Geek Squad. They make me look even better.
Actually getting -1 from Windows users is like music to my ears. Thank you very much!
And remember, if you have a problem with Linux, I'll help however I can; if you got a problem with Windows, there's a guy who can help you, too -- alas, it's not me, because I want you to be exploited by those bad techies, just because you're stupid enough to be manipulated by M$ (and fsck us all in the process).
Thank you for your attention.
I dare you to minus one this comment, too -- actually, I'm not trolling, since these are my true feelings, but you know what: /. system is a great incentive to trolls: I bet they yearn for a -1, because it means someone has reda their comment. "0" OTOH is a total unknown, it may mean nobody read it or -- worse -- nobody gave a damn about it.
“I fell victim to a company that cold-called and fed me all the patter about viruses, and because I’m a computer Luddite they were phenomenally persuasive,” reported reader Cougar J. “I ended up going for their ‘Diamond’ option at £199.99. Now I’m petrified because I gave them all my credit card details and they also accessed my computer virtually.”
To support parent, here is an example of a person who could have easily fall for a myriad other "persuasive" phone calls. I say 200 quid is a great bargain for a priceless piece of education: don't give your credit card number and personal details to random callers.
Being a computer Luddite has nothing to do with it, it's plain old stupidity.
Depends on the platform. Some systems are just plain easier to break or require more attention from the user. The tech sitting across from me, for what he works on, I bet he would agree with that. But for me, it's approximately the other way around, I'd say about 90% of my repairs are failed components. (and no, that's not because the components are less reliable, they're roughly equal) What I work on just does a better job of maintaining itself and protecting the user from themselves.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
If you're not a pulmonologist, stop breathing.
And vacuum the dust out of your computer before going in for expensive repairs. (Yes I'm punning. And diverging from the thread.)
Had a friend with a computer that was slowing down, especially after running for a bit. Concerned about virii, friend took it to Fry's for a professional cleanout. Also bought a plugin backup drive (and paid to have the machine backed up before de-worming) and a different brand of antivirus software (switching from one major brand to another). Dropped about the cost of a new computer cleaning out the old one.
Turns out nothing suspicious was found on it. As the techie was handing it back (AFTER the bill had been paid) he mentioned that he'd vacuumed a lot of dust out of the CPU's heatsink and to try that again if it slows down again.
Apparently the problem was just that the airflow was restricted by dust and, when the machine got to crunching, the CPU thermal sensors and OS software were turning down the clock speed. B-b This feature (slowing down rather than burning out) has been deployed for years now.
So if the machine is slowing down, be sure to open the covers and give it a pass with the crevice tool before running up a big bill chasing possibly non-existent infections, failures, and configuration inadequacies.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Easy for you to say but there is only so much time in the day to learn about everything, At some point you have to trust some people to just do their jobs. Say you run a small business and you need a few computers to to that. The only thing important is that you need the computers and you need them to work. Time spent learning about computer components and even basic trouble shooting to prevent being ripped off a few hundred dollars, is time that could be spent selling your product or service to new clients or customers to make thousands in profit.
If you need some wiring done in your house, do you buy a book on basic wiring so you can check what the electrician did? If you need a plumber, do you learn basic plumbing code to is if your plumber is being lazy or trying to cheat you? If your car breaks down, do you spend hours in internet forums trying to get the internet to diagnose your problem before you take it to a mechanic?
At some point you just need to trust people to do their job, other wise you need to do everything your self and that is just not piratical. Find people you can trust to do good work for you but sometimes that trust is misplaces. All this article does is show a few warning signs to look out for before you do trust someone.
Fixing windows machines is almost too easy these days. About 85%+ of all my computer repairs involve removing rogue antivirus apps with ComboFix and MBAM. Run MyDefrag, CCleaner, TCPOptimizer, PC Decrapifier, Autoruns et al. and the machine is done.
Some "repairs" are even easier than that, involving something as simple as a driver install.
For more serious issues, it's either a repair install (XP), system restore (rarely works properly), or a backup + reinstall. This assumes that the system cannot login at all. If it can, sfc /scannow or any number of existing patches/fixes does the job.
Even the things that I once considered "truly challenging" are anything but. I just rescued a dying hard drive (intermittently clicking) the other day with a Trinity Rescue Kit CD and:
mkdir /smb && mount -t cifs //server/data /smb && cd /smb
dd if=/dev/sda bs=1024K conv=noerror,sync | gzip -c > rescued.dd.gz
Yeah, let's blame the victim and not the douchbag that ripped them off.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
I’m not sure why this is news. Dishonest people/companies in the repair services such as auto-repair, HVAC, plumbing, insurance, etc have been doing things like this for a long time. I think the article would have been better if after listing the examples it then gave the common precautions people use to avoid the shysters.
Actually I do pretty much always try to figure out how to do things myself. When I needed some wiring doing in my house I researched what needed to be done and realised that it would probably take more time to get a quote from an electrician than to actually do the work myself. The same thing applied to plumbing; I was astonished at how easy basic plumbing is - I re-plumbed my entire bathroom in about an hour.
On the other hand, when my car needed work doing, I found out that the equipment required would cost more than getting the work done professionally, even if I was being over charged. Also, I don't like getting my hands dirty!
If I needed my appendix removing I would trust a doctor, rather than try the operation myself. Probably.
To a man who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Clearly, all you have is arrogance.
Personally I think high schools should allocate an afternoon to simple PC construction.
Yeah, and I'm sure everyone will show up, not just the geeks.
Do you think most of these people really even care to learn? No. They get pissed when they get ripped off and they'll remember the guy and the company for a long time, but they still don't care about how it works or how to troubleshoot it. Most people are like that and it's just a fact of life.
If you need some wiring done in your house, do you buy a book on basic wiring so you can check what the electrician did?
If you need a plumber, do you learn basic plumbing code to is if your plumber is being lazy or trying to cheat you?
If your car breaks down, do you spend hours in internet forums trying to get the internet to diagnose your problem before you take it to a mechanic?.
Yes to all 3 actually (except spending hours on the net trying to troubleshoot a breakdown).
Basic electrical isn't that hard to understand. The hard part is usually running the wire. Every outlet sold in the US has a little diagram for how it goes on.
Knowing how pipes fit together isn't that difficult either. Again, a basic knowledge of plumbing doesn't take very long to learn.
A car breakdown isn't too difficult to figure out. Is the "battery light" on? Does it have gas? Does it make any sound when you turn the key? Did the idiot light (oil light) come on before the car stopped? All of those are pretty basic, yet the vast majority of people would have no idea how to diagnose it.
Anything more complex than those and yes, at that point you'd need to take it to someone to have it fixed.
And please for the love of all that is good QUIT GOING TO WORST BUY! Because I swear I've had to fix more horribly broken shit from them than from any other shop! So just ask around, an honest fixit guy is more than happy to give you references of past customers.
The only problem with this bit of advice is that we keep telling people it, but they keep doing it anyway because they don't want to pay our rates. Then they get mad when it ends up coming out worse.
I do computer repair on the side (I have a regular day job) and I constantly get people asking me about problems with their computer. They don't even have the computer with them yet they want the error explained and solved (they've written it down of course) so they can go home and fix it. I don't even bother trying to help them. And of course, there are people who want their machine fixed because they're a co-worker. They will actually bring their computer to work and ask if you can look at it. Most of the time I just tell them "Sure, after work and I usually bill X amount". Then I glance at it before giving them an estimate. Sorry folks, I am not your personal computer repair technician. It's rare for someone at work to ask about their home computer and be willing to pay to have it fixed.
The only people that get a pass on that are the two owners of the company and the VP.
That never occurred to me... is my computer safe in the hands of a computer repair person?
But, lucky for me (a computer nerd who has been building his own PCs since the early 90s, installing his own software, eradicating viruses and spyware himself, etc) I've never had anyone besides myself upgrade or do any other work on my computer. That would be like pest control person not spraying his own house and calling an exterminator... it just wouldn't happen.
Not even close. If the repairman removes SOME of the RAM, then the computer will continue to function afterwards. The engine renders the card completely inoperable.
For a car analogy, it'd be more akin to the repair guy swapping out a V8 that someone brings in with a lower power/cost V6. A lot of people might not know the difference from a quick inspection - even in using it "something" might be a little off but it might not be immediately obvious what it is.
All in all, the established relationship we have is that in all things, the people that use them typically aren't expected to know how to fix them.
Here, most of us know how to fix a computer so it's easy to point and say "LOL - noobs!", but realistically the rest of us likely have cars, refridgerators, dish washers, washing machines, televisions, etc that we would have absolutely no clue how to repair if they broke. That doesn't make those people idiots - it just means that those items fall outside of their skill set.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The only problem with that is that most computer servicing isn't worth $20/hr, atleast not at the relative level of service. When you're sitting here unraveling a bitch of a virus or replacing their MB I can understand that rate goes but otherwise cut that rate in about half for most services. Especially since most technicians are associate degree holders or just certificate holders, academic degree creep or not most techs aren't that certified to touch PCs. I've had my video card replaced twice in my laptop from Dell due to it being from the faulty Nvidia group. I could easily have replaced it but I had to wait for a tech for warranty reasons. If I had it off warranty it would have cost $100 for him to show up for 15 minutes of work. The prices are exorbitant because it is a young industry still. It's just now creeping over about 10 years old as a real service and people don't understand the value yet. In another 5-10 years the prices and rogue repairmen will calm down I suspect.
Slashdot, really: we ARE real engineers, unlike the Geek Squad type places; we KNOW how to fix computers; so posting yet another article on how lesser engineers are unreliable, immoral and unable to fix problems that we're able to fix... That is basically the ongoing and constant story of our professional lives. Please, editors, keep in mind your audience when you're choosing articles for slashdot. Thank you.
I write and maintain the website for a tile import business, and work in the shipping department, and keep the computers and server up and running. Not business in the sense you mentioned, but a business.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
You have sparked my curiosity. What do you work on?
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
Do you think most of these people really even care to learn? No. They get pissed when they get ripped off and they'll remember the guy and the company for a long time, but they still don't care about how it works or how to troubleshoot it. Most people are like that and it's just a fact of life.
You act as though you think it's unreasonable to be "like that."
Honestly, if you have enough money to hire somebody to fix your computer for you and you still do it yourself anyway, you are a geek. Period. For most people -- even technically-savvy people -- there is nothing fun or rewarding about cleaning up a wrecked computer. Life's too short, and there are too many other interesting things worth doing.
The real problem is that most people who take a computer in to the shop expect that the people who will be attempting to fix it will be at least as competent as your average auto mechanic. Most are not. I've heard all kinds of crackpot theories, dumb advice, and outright lies that were told to my non-geek friends by computer repair types. There really ought to be some kind of certification, but I'll be damned if I know how to create one and have it mean anything.
Breakfast served all day!
The problem is that most people (well, the vast majority of Americans, and probably UKers, too, and Asians for that matter, what with the "rice bowl" and "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down") are not naturally curious.
Oh, that's such bullshit.
Q: Have you ever wondered what a wasp's nest looks like on the inside?
A: Sure, I guess.
Q: Great! You are one of the few naturally curious people left in the world. I happen to have a wasp's nest right here, would you like to stick your head in it?
Breakfast served all day!
Knowing how pipes fit together isn't that difficult either. Again, a basic knowledge of plumbing doesn't take very long to learn.
And yet, if you set out to re-do all the plumbing in your house with the understanding that plumbing is really nothing but knowing how to fit pipes together, you're in for a big surprise the first time you flush the toilet.
Breakfast served all day!
Avast free is a better choice, as it has web shield which scans pages before they load and will strip out nasty scripts like drive bys, has P2P and messenger protection, all in all I'd say it is a better AV and with both being 100% free (I'd never give a customer trialware crap) why not use the better solution?
I'd say "better" in this respect is somewhat subjective. Your description of Avast sounds too resource-hungry and intrusive for my own needs. I also find MSE's interface to be that much more brain-dead simple, which in this context is probably a good thing. But I don't see how it really matters either way; you and the GP are essentially giving the same advice.
Breakfast served all day!
Knowing how to check your RAM isn't like knowing how to rebuild your car engine.
Depends what you mean by "check your RAM." If you mean opening a control panel to find out how much RAM you actually have, sure. But if you mean actually swapping out their RAM or adding more, I really do think that's beyond most people. Haven't you ever seen people with three keys missing on their laptop keyboard and a crack in the case and wondered how somebody could spend $1,000 on something and still treat it that way? Asking those people to plug in a USB cable is one thing; asking them to plug in a DIMM is another.
You're also probably coming from the bias of having built your PC yourself. Some of the cases they use to build consumer off-the-shelf PCs from Best Buy etc. do not make it easy to swap out the hard drive, let alone RAM.
Breakfast served all day!
Totally agree. Just a few weeks ago I was having trouble with my video card. One monitor wouldn't power up right, then it would, but it wouldn't get the right resolution, etc. I tried every combination of re-loading a System Restore point, re-installing drivers, swapping out cables ... then one afternoon I went to reboot the machine, heard a sharp "Snap!" and a little plume of greyish smoke came out of the back of my PC. The machine kept booting, but neither monitor would light up. "Aaaaaah, so that was it!" These things just happen.
Breakfast served all day!
stereotypical scams that he missed. What kind of worthless 'cowboy" did he interview?
Or buy a non-consumer laptop.
This wasn't a story about the ability to build computers or other electronics. This car analogy is not a comparison of two similar themes. You're making an analogy between users who don't notice RAM that's suddenly missing (requires basic technical knowledge) and the mechanical skill it takes to rebuild a modern car engine (requires advanced mechanical and technical knowledge). That isn't instructive or edifying; it's misleading though it's an easy mistake to make.
I'd answer it by saying I wouldn't know how to rebuild my car's engine, but if a repair shop removed it and replaced it with a significantly inferior engine without telling me, I would notice. I think that's a fair analogy to removing a stick of RAM.
Really? I wouldn't know for a second if they dropped in an older engine or a slightly smaller one. More to the point, it wouldn't even occur to me to look. If it were significantly inferior, fine, I would notice, but that's not an appropriate analogy. I wouldn't call 2 GB significantly inferior to 3 GB if you're not doing a lot of RAM intensive stuff. Hell, I only run into paging problems on my work computer when I have large Inventor assemblies open with a few tabs of Firefox, etc.
I wouldn't notice if they changed my oil, but used a cheaper grade than what I asked for. In the computer world, you can get different brands, speeds, and quality RAM. Hell, I don't even know where to find the speed of the RAM on this old PowerBook G4 besides looking on the actual stick.
I do think you're absolutely right about the ethics bit. It reminds me of the Ron Paul schtick about heroine. Good people wouldn't do bad things even if there were no rules prohibiting them.
The problem is that most people (well, the vast majority of Americans, and probably UKers, too, and Asians for that matter, what with the "rice bowl" and "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down") are not naturally curious.
Oh, that's such bullshit.
Q: Have you ever wondered what a wasp's nest looks like on the inside?
A: Sure, I guess.
Q: Great! You are one of the few naturally curious people left in the world. I happen to have a wasp's nest right here, would you like to stick your head in it?
So anytime you are curious about anything, you must always satisfy that curiosity in the most stupid, unsafe manner possible then? There are no intermediary steps such as reading a book, looking up a Wikipedia entry, doing a Google search? If you really insist on hands-on learning, there's no ability to obtain a beekeeper's suit and then open the nest? Just have to expose oneself to the high probability of preventable injury, then, because there's no other way? That's the real "bullshit".
You haven't responded to a single thing Nutria mentioned. You merely reject common sense and think that maybe this will be relevant. It isn't.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's a 1/3 reduction of the available memory. Imagine a 1/3 reduction in the available horsepower of my car's engine. I drive it on a daily basis and have done so for years. How it feels to drive it is second nature. I would definitely notice a 33.3% reduction in horsepower. I might not immediately think "hey, they must have swapped engines!" but I would definitely know that the car suddenly had less power immediately after taking it to that shop.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I work in the end user business, but I bet we're dealing with the same commodity crap. I would say that the majority of the time it's just shit parts. Cheap power supplies, underpowered fans, shit like that. It's amazing how many motherboards I've seen scorched because some manufacturer was too cheap to put on another $0.03 worth of heat sink compound. Sometimes I get the gems like "somebody dropped a bowling ball on the laptop," but honestly most people lack the skill to really break something. That takes a professional :)
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
So they list worst case scenarios and fail to list real instances or companies. It's a purely sensationalist article that feeds on consumer worries.
Most "nightmares" stem from customer not understanding or not reading the service quote. You can tell them you'll not change the labor estimate and they'll still call back in horror when work has exceeded the estimate (in real time not labor). You can tell them you'll need the MS Office disc and license key and they'll still be shocked when work isn't complete even though the needed items were never brought in. Lastly, do you actually think a computer savvy Technician needs your My Picture folder to find new p0rn? It's an insult to Tech workers everywhere and, frankly, self masturbatory to think we want your pics.
Explain your problem. Listen to the service offered to solve said problem. Ask questions before and immediately after service. Fear not the healer. Fear ignorance.
I take it you haven't tried it? I've found it actually uses less resources than MSE, as it doesn't use the extra shields if you aren't running an app that would require them. For example no P2P app? No P2P shield running. Its defaults are pretty much "plug and play" and the only thing I ask folks is if they want the voice or not. Some think its cool that Avast will "talk" instead of beeping and bonging when it finds something, others prefer the quiet of a pop up only.
So you should really give it a try, its free, its easy, doesn't slam the CPU, all in all a nice app. And I don't think we are giving the same advice as I've found MSE to be more like ClamWin whereas Avast is more like a HIPS system. With MSE it won't say anything if you have missed a scan, hell it won't say anything if you don't update it for several days either if you have the notification not set to always be visible in Vista/7 whereas Avast will tell you with a pop up and voice if you'd like "I'm not able to update, please check connection" or "Your regular scan was missed, would you like to run it now?" I've also noticed that MSE, at least in my experience, isn't really great at dealing with JavaScript nastiness, whereas Avast works like a HIPS and scans the page BEFORE it loads, thus keeping drive bys away. It is a subtle difference but an important one IMHO.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Generally people aren't willing to pay for skill, so they get none. Competent people aren't going to suffer minimum wage to repair pc's.
What you are left with are incompetents and frauds.
It's still almost that simple, except now you need a Philips screwdriver instead of a coin. (Considering that I pay for everything with a card, I'm more likely to have a Philips screwdriver than a coin anyway, so I think that's an improvement!)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Ever since my mum's computer became useless, I've had no problems either.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Macintosh. I try to avoid mentioning it because the trolls come out in force screaming "fanboy!" no matter what I say.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
"but I would definitely know that the car suddenly had less power immediately after taking it to that shop."
Really? Even if on that day there was something going on in town that had all traffic crawling along? If you could never get even to 20 mph, how would you know? Is it 200hp, or is it still 300hp? Same with hitting the extra RAM. 2GB will work just fine if you're not doing much. Think aunt Martha would notice her email was not opening up quite as snappily? Actually, I think it would open just as fast as it did before, because you'd still be within the 2GB. Even Windows isn't THAT greedy.
Honestly, if you have enough money to buy fish and still go fishing...
...if you have enough money to eat out and still cook...
...if you have enough money to go to a barber and still shave...
I gave up sigs almost a year ago.
makes you wonder which large national retailer they could all be working for in that area.
Now where in the world.... ?
Everybody there seems to drive on the wrong side of the road, so it's safer overall to just accept it and do the same.
Haha, I did just this about a month ago. Drain was slow as shit and the liquid plumber didn't work. Got a snake for about $20 and found a bunch of hair wrapped around a bottle cap that fell down the drain. Took less than 5 minutes with the snake, would have cost at least $100 or so for a plumber.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
After completing the job even though I had explained my rates up front she started complaining about how much higher my rates were than the guy that messed up her computer before.
I explain it like this: The last guy who worked on the machine was incompetent or dishonest and that caused or contributed to the present problem. I now have to discover and undo everything he did before I can even get started actually fixing your current problem, so yes, it's going to take much longer the first time I work on your machine, compared to a machine from a repeat customer that I've worked on in the past.
The corollary to this, which should be obvious, is that if they have the incompetent guy come for something after I've worked on the machine, and he screws everything up again, I will explain that the incompetent guy and I have very different approaches to our trade, and that it's simply not cost effective for them to be using more that one IT person. I let the incompetent guy have these customers--they deserve each other.
Sent from my iPhone
So anytime you are curious about anything, you must always satisfy that curiosity in the most stupid, unsafe manner possible then?
I prefer to satisfy my curiosity by watching a YouTube video of someone satisfying their curiosity in the most stupid, unsafe manner possible.
More Twoson than Cupertino
If that was a sink you could have just removed the trap under the sink.
With MSE it won't say anything if you have missed a scan
Sure it will.
hell it won't say anything if you don't update it for several days either
I believe it will, but why on earth would you disable the automatic updates? Windows Update will prompt you to install the latest updates when it runs, but even if you choose not to install them, MSE has its own update mechanism and they get installed anyway.
I've also noticed that MSE, at least in my experience, isn't really great at dealing with JavaScript nastiness, whereas Avast works like a HIPS and scans the page BEFORE it loads, thus keeping drive bys away. It is a subtle difference but an important one IMHO.
Yeah that's the part that sounds too intrusive. I don't need an AV program slowing down every Web page I try to load. But like I said, it's a matter of preference. I don't think the average user really needs a HIPS running on their workstation.
Breakfast served all day!
Or a klutz with a bowling ball :D
If you're charging to install freeware that's practically the same thing.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,