Proof that I care about my work

[wmrcomputers]

I'm not one to usually slate another business publicly, but think this should be mentioned. The below is a customers 1TB hard drive which has failed. It has just spent 12 days in the possession of PC World, who have returned it to the customer saying that not a single file can be recovered.

Well, PC World, I've just spent 12 painstaking hours (in fact I haven't been to bed) and recovered all 447GB of my new customers data!

I assume that because of the length of time and effort involved that PC world don't think this is viable for their £80 data recovery fee. Either that or I'm far more skilled than I give myself credit for. I suppose my purpose of posting this is to say that if anyone is ever unfortunate enough to lose data through hard drive failure, bring it to someone like myself who values your data as much as you do yourself. Fair enough, on some occasions it will be un-recoverable, but if I were to tell you that you would know that I went to hell and back doing everything in my power to save your memories and hard work.

Shame on you PCW! I'm now off to give my customer the great news

 

[Jonah]

I wouldn't trust PC World to repair ANYTHING let alone try to recover data.

Good job @wmrcomputers - it just shows that there are people who do proper work and care about the customer.

 

[Chick]

My Grandad's laptop had an issue with the power connector. The cable had been pushed in too far to the socket and had damaged both the cable and the socket so it was no longer charging. My Mum took it to PC World only to be told it would cost her £200+ for a new motherboard. As I work in IT she dropped it round for me to have a look to confirm if it really did need a new motherboard before she spent that amount of money.

It cost me £15 for a new power cable and internal power socket plus a few hours of my time to take it apart, fit it and put it back together

 

[wmrcomputers]

This is another story I've come across several times before. I assume they can't use soldering irons!

 

[Darren]

My Grandad's laptop had an issue with the power connector. The cable had been pushed in too far to the socket and had damaged both the cable and the socket so it was no longer charging. My Mum took it to PC World only to be told it would cost her £200+ for a new motherboard. As I work in IT she dropped it round for me to have a look to confirm if it really did need a new motherboard before she spent that amount of money.

It cost me £15 for a new power cable and internal power socket plus a few hours of my time to take it apart, fit it and put it back together

Same thing happened to me with a really old Laptop, they quoted £200 for a new Mobo the laptop was so old it wasn't worth £100 , Luckily i have only a £50 excess so i claimed it on that and got a voucher to spend for £450 .
That laptops charge broke so i bought a universal one for about £60 from PC world and after a bit if time the socket that fit my Laptop broke so i went back to Pcworld and asked if they sold a replacement part and they said no i would have to buy a whole new one at another £60, so i went to Maplins and got a replacement part for under £3. On another occasion some guy was in pc world buying a Laptop for his daughter and the sales assistant told him he need all these different security programs, so i went and asked the assistant for a pen and wrote down the free ones and gave it to the guy then told him he didn't need any of them to go download the ones i had written down. Pcworld = Cash Grab.

 

[Mikinton]

On another occasion some guy was in pc world buying a Laptop for his daughter and the sales assistant told him he need all these different security programs, so i went and asked the assistant for a pen and wrote down the free ones and gave it to the guy then told him he didn't need any of them to go download the ones i had written down.

Let's hope Avast wasn't one of the free security programs you mentioned. There were problems when I went from Win8.1 to Win10 caused by Avast. I've since uninstalled it and now use whatever came with Windows 10 (Defender?).

Going back to the OP, how much would you charge for something that you knew would take you "12 painstaking hours". A little more than £80 I hope.

 

[1JKz]

I know @wmrcomputers is my first port of call if anything goes wrong with my laptop, good work mate!

 

[Darren]

Let's hope Avast wasn't one of the free security programs you mentioned. There were problems when I went from Win8.1 to Win10 caused by Avast. I've since uninstalled it and now use whatever came with Windows 10 (Defender?).

Going back to the OP, how much would you charge for something that you knew would take you "12 painstaking hours". A little more than £80 I hope.

This was a while ago i recommended AVG, Malwarebytes and Superantispyware all have free versions.

 

[Mikinton]

This was a while ago i recommended AVG, Malwarebytes and Superantispyware all have free versions.

I used to use the first two. I went from AVG to Avast probably around the time I changed my laptop. And I uninstalled Malwarebytes yesterday after it seemed to be asking me for money at the end of a free trial (I'll re-install it if ever I need it).

The "problem" I have with free software is that if a person is confident enough to use it (like me and thee) then they're probably already using it - or are at least aware of it. I installed AVG in my missus' laptop and it seemed like every so often she'd call me over and ask "what does this mean?" and I'd say "Oh, you need to do this". Now I don't know if the same level of "interaction" would be necessary with the software from the AV "big boys", but if all it was was to send them a £40 payment every 12 months, some people may be quite happy with that.

I used to work for the council. Back in 1999 we bought an AV product called Invircible which had an interesting approach to spotting viruses. It would keep a record of filesizes of all the files that may get infected, and if it noticed any changes, it would challenge it. The benefit was, you didn't need to download anything every day (or whatever) to keep pace with the latest flavour of computer virus. At the time, the approach worked, or at least they convinced us that it did. Not so our auditors, though. They weren't impressed that we were using some unknown product to protect the councils systems and data, so whilst the product had never let us down, they insisted we move to one of the market leaders at the time McAfee, Doc Solomon etc. They were probably right to do so. If Invircible had let us down, questions would have been asked, .... but if we were using one of the market leaders, then as long as were keeping things up-to-date, we couldn't be criticised and would have no reason to beat ourselves up. As they used to say "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM".

 

[wmrcomputers]

Going back to the OP, how much would you charge for something that you knew would take you "12 painstaking hours". A little more than £80 I hope.

My fixed fee of £30 covers most jobs - in fact the only thing that's not included is data recovery. Sometimes a windows re-install can take several hours but I still charge £30, although I can get other jobs done inbetween updates etc. On this occassion I charged the same £80 that PC World would have charged if they had succeeded... purely because it required non-stop intervention and was quite literally 12 hours of solid work. To date it has been the most expensive job I've done (not including parts), but to the customer I think it was regarded as money well spent.

I have customers that tell me they can't afford £30. I also have customers that tell me I should charge much more because of the speed at which I get the job done and the quality of my work. I personally look at it as a reasonable fee to put on a job well done. Sometimes I've earned that £30 in under 30 minutes, the next time it could be something that takes me several hours. It's all about give and take.

 

[wmrcomputers]

i recommended AVG

I used to until around 2011. Now it's a free anti-virus in the sense of "We'll let you have it for free because we're going to push and push until you buy something from us. We'll also give you this tune-up program for free and then tell you why you should pay for that too" kind of wares.
It also started to produce some very bad conflicts with Malwarebytes in around 2011 / 2012 that caused massive lock-ups. I lost my faith in it and have never gone back to it since.

 

[Gramaisc]

Top marks to @wmrcomputers for tarting up a laptop for me - works a treat and I may no longer have the regular fortnights in purdah when I head westwards.

There is neither need nor point in going anywhere else.