Why They Need Me

One of the employees at the big client e-mailed me yesterday after getting frustrated with the place she took her home computer.  She uses dialup, and gets an absurdly slow connection, like four minutes to load her home page.

She took her machine to a computer place and they have cleaned it and scanned it and tried to bully her into upgrading and into turning off her firewall and antivirus.  The cost so far: $200.

They have not tested the modem.

Not. Troubleshot. The. Modem. Or. Connectivity.

She lives in my town, which makes me assume it’s one of the two computer places in town.  One of them, I have met the owner and he’s not very technical, having bought the shop from the original owner.  He knows how to handle the problem if it’s a virus, so he automatically assumes any problem is a virus.  The other place left Deb with a bad impression the one time she walked by it.  There was a be back at X time sign up, and it was already way past that time.  If they’re good, that’s not the end of the world.  There may be another place she used, but for all it’s a hotbed of high tech, the area near work is lacking in similar computer shops.  One in Raynham that might be considered close enough to on the way is definitely reputable.  I even bought stuff from them at a computer show, years ago.  Actually, I bought stuff from the company that is poaching the big client, years ago when they were still a mom and pop computer store and did the computer show circuit for the extra boost.  They long since don’t deal with home users anymore, and aren’t exactly the cheapest option for the smallest businesses.

So I asked which one of them it was, in an effort to get some business intelligence.  (I also described my plans somewhat, on the idea of getting feedback from someone who might be a customer.) I suspect I may end up fixing it, unless she calls Earthlink after getting the machine back, and they walk her through what one of the possibles is.  It could be a bad POP (or automatically assigned DNS), which means dialing another to test (and/or changing DNS settings).  It could be a dying modem.  It could be corruption of the driver and/or Windows communications components, which means removing and reinstalling them.  It sounds like none of the possibilities were addressed.  I mean, it’s obvious that if something worked and now it doesn’t, you test the most logical thing first.  In this case, malware isn’t even the most logical first thing to go after, though normally it’s a possibility.

The bad thing about computer work is the cost is genuinely so high for the value of the hardware.  $200 Sounds about double what I’d expect for what it sounds like they’ve done, but it doesn’t take much to get up to $200 legitimately.  That would be like taking the van to the shop and it costing $850 to fix it.  Oh wait…

It ends up being more about the data and the intangibles associated with the computer, rather than the base cost of the hardware.  It’s still rough, though.

If I ever get business cards designed, printed and ready to go, my very first place where stacks of them will be handed out is to the employees of the big client.  I can’t think of anyone better or more likely to hire or refer me for incidents like the above.

1. I believe the place you speak of in Raynham Used to be very good.  I even took a case and motherboard I was having an issue with there once and they tested it for me for free.
   Not sure if it has change or not.

   Posted by wayne  on  04/20  at  07:14 PM  from  ohio
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