Portland Computer Repair by Happy Hamster

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

Just wanted to drop a quick note to say that although the company is still taking calls and doing our best to solve problems over the phone, our technicians do not have heavy duty vehicles. So if you wouldn’t feel safe going out for a drive, we probably can’t either. We are doing our best to reschedule and accomodate everybody, but for the next day or two (heck, probably for most of this week if the reports are right) service calls will be seriously curtailed.

We obviously feel as bad about this as you do, as we want to get your computers up and running as fast as possible, and where there are breaks in the weather or traffic we will do so, otherwise, please be patient with us! We’re dealing with the exact same circumstances you are.

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

I want to warn you today about something we are seeing a lot of. We have had three seperate computers come in today, and each one had the same problem. Each one was a dell, and each one would boot up, and then show a cursor against a black background, and be otherwise frozen.

Don’t let this happen to you! Go to update.microsoft.com and download the latest windows updates/security patches now, and they will protect you from this dangerous new virus. Also, as always, make sure your virus protection is running and up to date.

If you get hit with this virus, it’s not a hue

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

We get this question from a lot of people, “should I get vista?” and we have one clear answer: absolutely not. The reason is simple: there is no gain. I’m not going to bash Vista because quite frankly at this point Vista is a fine, stable operating system. The thing is, Vista gives you nothing new, and it requires a much more powerful computer. So, if I have to choose between a “prettier” operating system that takes up more system resources, or a “less pretty” operating system that leaves more system resources free to run my programs, I would prefer that.

Another way to look at things is the basic windows progression, which shows that every other version of windows is a good version.

The first windows, 3.1, was a major leap forward for computers, and it was an excellent operating system for the time.

The second windows, 95, was lousy. It used system resources poorly, and crashed often.

The third windows, 98, fixed most of the 95 problems, and behaved fairly well.

The forth windows, ME, was a disaster. It was only installed for about 6 months before being discontinued, it was incredibly buggy and crashed constantly.

The fifth windows, XP, is the best windows yet. It is fast, stable, and feature rich.

The sixth windows, Vista, started out as a disaster, and is not just plain mediocre.

The next windows, Windows Seven, will hopefully be good! We will wait and see when it is released.

Okay, tune in tomorrow for more computer tips and tricks, thanks!

-Zac

Hey Everybody  in Portland Computer Repair Land,

In celebration of our 300th caller this morning, I decided to do some statistics in this post.

We have had 300 calls since we opened our doors 3.5 months ago. Of those 300 callers, 154 hired us to do work on their computers. Of those 154:

20% has a virus.

15% had a dead hard drive or had lost important data.

10% had cracked their laptop LCD screen and needed it replaced.

9% had windows corruption issues.

7% had bad laptop DC jacks.

5% had to have their laptop motherboard replaced.

The rest fall into various other categories of less than 5% of the total.

Of our 154 jobs, we have completed 153 successfully. The one we failed on was a Sager laptop on which we could not find how to remove the old DC jack in order to replace it.

Okay, thats all for statistics day! We’ll be back tomorrow with more computer repair tips and tricks.

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,
Today I would like to talk to you about the most dangerous animal in your house: your cat. Many of you think that cats are in fact very clean animals. This may be true overall, but it is not true when it comes to your computer. I will relay a story from today to make my point.

A customer called and reported all the usual signs for overheating. Computer worked fine when on for short periods of time, but not long periods. Computer froze during photoshop usage (which is very heavy on the fans). Computer shut down slowly. All of these are basic overheating symptoms.

I took in the customers computer, opened it up, and quickly found the problem: a mat of cat hair so thick it was stopping the primary fan from spinning. I have seen few things quite so gross in a computer! I actually was able to pull the entire thing out in one piece, and it looked like a blanket designed for a mouse. Truly horrifying.

The users computer was five years old, and she had six cats who lived in her appartment. They might be cleaner animals overall, but their shedding can cause serious issues for a computer. So, please, if you have cats, keep them away from the computer, and dust the box out once in awhile! It’ll save you money down the road, as a cooler computer lives longer than a hot one.

Thanks everybody,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

Today I want to talk about something that might seem basic to many of you, but which will come as news to some. This is an issue that has come up twice in the last two days, so it needs to be addressed: the modular design of computers.

Computers are designed to be upgraded, altered, repaired and expanded. Your motherboard (the main hub of activity in your computer) can connect to any number of devices, and almost certainly has free slots to do anything you might want to do. Want to add wireless capability to your computer? No problem, we can plug that chip straight into your existing motherboard. Want to add a second hard drive so you have more space? Again, no problem, your motherboard already has a spot ready to plug another hard drive into.

This also extends to the question of if you should replace a computer. The death of a single component does not portend the death of the entire machine. Today we had a customer with a dead hard drive who was preparing to throw away the entire computer. This is completely unncessary! For much less than the price of a new computer, we can simply throw in a new hard drive. No matter what you want, your computer is probably already equiped to do it, or be expanded into it. This includes making it run faster, making the graphics better, adding a DVD player, or basically anything else you might want.

So the next time you’re thinking about getting a new computer, consider upgrading instead. Your computer might have a lot more life left in it than you give it credit for.

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

Today I want to talk about the best friend of computer repair technicians everywhere. The answer is not any single piece of software, or a screwdriver. No, your best friend for computer repair is google. Thats right, that plain jane basic search engine that you use every day to find everything your life is the same way I am able to appear so frequently brilliant.

I will illustrate with an example. I have a computer that was getting an error I have never seen before, “lsass.exe object not found.” This error was causing the computer to crash repeatedly. This is not an error I have ever heard of, or have any familiarity with. However a simple google search for the error message, and checking the first 7 results led me straight to my answer. Granted, the answer was four pages long and took an hour to impliment, but after I was done, the computer worked again! So I will appear brilliant to my customer for fixing this extremely complicated question,

Hey Everybody in Portand, Or Computer Repair Land,

Many of you have a desk that was designed with a cute enclosed space for your computer. It’s probably got a door in front of it, and wood on both sides. For some of you, it even has a wood panel in the back with a hole for your wires.

I like to call these computer cubby holes “tiny furnance death traps.” I call them this because computers like to overheat and die in these confined spaces. You see, your computer generates a huge amount of heat. This heat needs to go somewhere, and while most people think it just goes out of the fans in the back, this is not strictly speaking true. Your computer actually radiates heat in all directions, out the back, the front, and the side. It is a bad idea, therefor, to have it at all confined, as overheating can cause your computer to behave in all sorts of strange ways. Overheating will slow down your computer, as it attempts to overcompensate. Sometimes the computer will simply shut down to save itself from damage. And sometimes the computer will overheat and die, never to live again.

So please people, keep your computers out in the open, with air on as many sides as possible.

Thanks!

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

For this post holiday blog, I think I would like to give you all another couple of amusing-but-true computer repair stories and problems.

First - The Tail of the Poorly Used Hairdryer

As you all know from reading this blog, spilled liquids on a computer can be a big problem. Sometimes a computer can be entirely destroyed in the worst cases, with full data loss. Other times, people get lucky and just lose a keyboard or an LCD screen.

Recently we had a fairly standard call about a water spill, and I went to investigate. When I arrived on scene and opened up the computer, I noticed that the motherboard didn’t look quite right. Everything was a little bit flatter than it should be…some of the resistors were slightly puddled, actually.

A little investigation turned up the culprit: the customer’s daughter, in an attempt to save her computer and fix the spill problem before mom came home, had used a hair dryer on her computer’s motherboard to get rid of the water. In doing so, she had managed to physically melt some of the motherboard components in the machine.

So people, please, keep in mind that getting rid of the evidence is fine, but do not attempt to dry the water in your computer using a hairdryer.

Story Number Two: The Poorly Aligned Neck

Recently a client came to us who said his computer worked fine, but that he could only open the screen about 20%, and then it started to crack the plastic. We took a look, and sure enough the hinge had broken free of its mooring and that it would take 2-3 days to get the part. The client sighed, said he needed the computer for business and that it was getting really painful to keep using it this way. We stood, shocked briefly, and then confirmed that the client was, in fact, using the computer by hunching down really low and sort of looking up at the screen.

We quickly informed the client that one can easily attached an external monitor to a laptop, and then use it that way. One needs not use the computers screen. The client was relieved, and so too, we hope, his neck!

So those are the stories of today, tune in later for more computer tips and tricks.

-Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Or Computer Repair Land,
Today I want to talk to you all about the hardest part of this job. The hardest part is not, surprisingly, fixing the problem. Fixing the problem can usually be done quickly and easily. No my friends, the hardest part is finding the damn problem. I will illustrate this fact with an example from today.

A customer came in who needed the DC jack on their laptop resoldered. This is not a problem, and it’s a job we do with some regularity. Usually the job takes about an hour and a half or two hours, and its not a big deal.

Except for the DV9000 From Hell, as we have affectionately taken to calling it. The DFH started out like any other laptop solder job. One of my technicians took off the old jack, and soldered on the new one. The new jack tested fine, so we reassembled the computer. We pushed the power button. Nothing. Oh crud…

So we tried all the usual, basic stuff. We disassembled and reassembled the computer a couple of times, and nothing. So we had to take the computer apart and spend half a day, probably three to four hours, going over every square inch of the motherboard, looking at every single connection, looking for a single thing that might not be quite in place. Finally we found the damn thing, it was a single metal pin bent out of place and touching another metal pin, which was shorting the entire computer. So we unbent the pin, and the computer worked fine.

So, to the customer the problem on the invoice looks like, “unbent metal pin” but for us, the problem really was finding the problem. The problem itself is incidental to the actual