Don’t Be Afraid To Ask

I spent four hours last Tuesday getting spyware and viruses deleted from a client’s computer. This isn’t unusual. It often takes that long or even longer, depending on the age of the system, how badly it’s infected, and the type and speed of the processor. This system was only three years old, but it had absolutely nothing going for it.

At its core was one of the slowest Pentium processors Intel ever made. It was actually designed for laptops. The processor is a Celeron. Because of its limited design, it was a great processor for battery hungry laptops. But it was terrible for desktop systems. Besides the hardware being slow and underpowered, the system was running Windows XP with only 128 megs of ram. This can be done, but XP (as much as I like this operating system) is a huge memory hog. I never recommend running XP with less than 256 megs of ram.

Even with the limitations of the Celeron processor, the system was tolerable. (To my client anyway.) Then a rash of viruses and spyware brought it to a standstill. When I first checked the computer, I noticed that there wasn’t any anti-virus software installed. This is just begging for trouble. And the spyware program was one that had popped up out of nowhere as my client was surfing the Net one day. This program actually does block out some spyware, but it installs its own at the same time!

More problems…the hard drive had never been defragmented, there were no utility programs available to fix registry errors, and the firewall was turned off. In short, it was a mess. It didn’t take me long to realize that this was going to be a three or four hour job. And to top it off, the computer was on a dialup connection. Just downloading the latest virus definitions would take over an hour.

Situations such as this present serious dilemmas for service techs. How can you justify four or five hours cleaning up a computer…knowing that the service charges could be more than what the computer’s worth? You can’t. Or at least, I can’t. At $60 and hour, this job could easily cost $240 for a computer was only worth about $300 to begin with.

So, I bit the bullet, did the work, and charged for an hour and a half. But don’t expect your average computer tech to do that. Most don’t work for themselves so they have no choice but to bill for every hour they work. It’s always a good idea to ask your technician for a ballpark estimate of what you’re getting into.

Of course, it’s possible that he may find some other things wrong as he does his diagnostics. But barring this, he should be able to give you a pretty good idea of what his service call is going to cost. The key of course, is to ask. Find out what’s wrong, what has to be done in order to fix it, and what you can do to keep it from happening again?

I’ve always enjoyed talking to clients as I work on their computers. But other techs may not be so verbally inclined. Still, you’re paying for the work, now is the time to gain some knowledge while you’re at it. And don’t forget to ask your tech if he has any free utilities that you can use to keep your system in prime condition. I always leave a few “goodies” on my client’s hard drive. And remember, there really are no dumb questions. Reach me at: randy@randybenjamin.com.