Confessions of a Computer Repairman 387
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."
Re:People fall for... obvious frauds (Score:4, Interesting)
Social engineering, the oldest trick in the book. It plays on us defaulting to trust unless otherwise proved (us being anyone not deep in military/corporate secrecy or it security).
hell, i tripped up once myself. I got a IM from a friend asking about a url, and thinking nothing of it i clicked on it. Thankfully it was aimed at Windows users, or i would be in deep trouble.
Basically the url used was laid out so that at a casual glance it directed one to a .com site. But actually what it did was download a .com binary...
Re:I have first-hand experience with this (Score:2, Interesting)
They made you?
Did they also force you not to loudly announce what had happened at the front of a full store?
Protip: In most of the Western world, you don't need that job to survive.
hrmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Three Points (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Sadly the scammers make it hard for legit business (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Confession Time (Score:4, Interesting)
Give me a break! Your market before Best Buy bought you out was the artsy types here in the Twin Cities. That's why you drove those old Citroens with the lousy paint jobs, wore the white shirts, black pants, and goofy glasses. It was to make those interior designers and advertising people feel good about themselves because at least they weren't YOU.
Geek Squad was NEVER about knowing what to do when faced with a real problem. If you couldn't get their printer driver working in 10 minutes, or find the On/Off button on their monitor, you farmed it out to one of our local shops here who had some real talent.
I've read enough (Score:5, Interesting)
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