Hey Everybody in Portand Computer Repair land,

This post is both short, and critically important. If you own a Dell, Gateway, HP, or any other brand of laptop, make sure you note what I’m going to say here today. You must, must, MUST back up all of your data before you send them your computer for a repair. It does not matter what they are repairing, when you send in your laptop they will often times wipe your hard drive and reinstall windows for no real reason. This does not happen every time, but it has happened often enough that you can’t take the risk.

To give the story a more human face, let me tell you about the customer that generates this thread today. Our customer does graphic design for a living and she had the touchpad (mouse) on her laptop break. Her computer was under warrenty, so she sent it in to HP to replace the touchpad. HP replaced the touchpad, and also reinstalled her operating system, even though it had nothing to do with the problem. This client lost almost 10 months of her graphics work, and is currently trying to piece it all back together from things she sent out in e-mails and other formats. Unfortunately, data recovery in these cases can be much more expensive (over $1000 sometimes) than a customer can afford, and this was just such a case.

So! Please remember, if you’re sending your laptop for repair, save your data first! You don’t know what they will do to your hard drive while they have it,
Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Happy Hamster Computer Repair Land,

Our new website is live! So go and visit and be amazed at the awesome hamsterage of it all.

Hey Everybody in Portand Computer Repair Land,
I want to talk today again about one of our favorite issues here on the blog. We have told you from time to time of how easily laptops break, so today I want to reinforce that notion. A client called today who said, “my mom picked up my backpack and my laptop fell out onto the floor, and now it won’t boot up.” As i type this customers computer is running a hard drive scan to see if the hard drive was damaged in that fall.

Unfortunately, it was. The hard drive scan is so far 18.29% complete, and a full 3% of the drive is damaged and unreadable. At this rate, roughly 1/5th of the drive will be entirely unreadable. This means that any files located in that 20% of the drive can not be recovered, and are now lost to the user forever (assuming no backups).

Lets just be clear about how small of a drop we’re talking about, a laptop falling out of a bag as it is picked up travels maybe 4-6 inches down to the floor. And yes, as I said to the clienThats enough.

So, this is your weekly reminder to be careful with your laptops! Sometimes you’ll get lucky, but often times you’ll end out like the poor computer in front of me.

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

A new happyhamstercomputers.com is coming in the next day or two! Stay tuned. We are very excited about the new look.

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody,

Today I got a call we get from time to time. I will paraphrase,

“Happy Hamster Computer Repair, this is Zac’

“Oh my god, I just accidentally overwrote a critical file containing years worth of important data and I have no backup please please please help me.”

“Oh, that is awful. Lets see what we can do to fix it.”

*Sound of the customer hyperventilating*

– End Scene –

So besides the obvious, which is that you should always have backups of important stuff, lets talk about how to undo damage you may already have done in the absence of backups.

There are two ways to go about it. The first and easiest is to try a system restore. A system restore attempts to restore your system to exactly the way it was at a certain checkpoint in time. To run a system restore, go to start->run and then enter, “restore” and press enter. Once this is complete, a window will pop up with a few items in it. Click on the picture that says, “rstrui” and follow the on screen instructions. Simply pick a point on the calender that is before the time of the file being overwritten, and click restore. Often times this will restore your missing or overwritten data.

In the event you delete a file (not overwrite it) you should call your handy computer professional, because it requires a bit more of a technical touch to get those files back (assuming they are not in your recycle bin!).

Thanks,

-Zac

Dear Everybody In Portland Computer Repair Land,

In the last week we have seen several cases of a very preventable illness: computers destroyed by spilled beverages. Now, of course, the obvious advice is to tell you to stop drinking beverages near your computers. This of course is silly advice, I am sitting here right now with a cup of tea next to my keyboard. Bad advice is often worth as little as no advice, and so I won’t do that. What I would like to talk about today is how to reduce the amount of damage done if you do spill something on your laptop.

First – Do not attempt to shut down your laptop in an orderly manner!

Second – Immediately remove the power cord

Third – Immediately remove the battery. These two steps will remove all power from your computer, and vastly reduce the odds that liquid will damage it.

Forth – Now that the major danger is removed, get a towel and dry up any liquid sitting on the surface of your laptop.

Fifth – Lay down a towel somewhere warm, but not in direct sunlight. Open your laptop as wide as you can, and place it, face down, on the towel.

Sixth  – This is the hard part, you must leave your laptop alone, all by itself, without attempting to turn it back on again, for at least 36 hours. This will give your laptop enough time for all the tiny bits of liquid inside of it to dry up.

Seventh – Let me repeat, the BIGGEST MISTAKE YOU CAN MAKE is to try to turn your laptop back on again too soon.

Eighth – After 36 hours have passed, you may put the battery and plug back in, and hope for the best! Usually, everything will be fine. If not, I know a great little computer repair shop…

Thanks,

-Zac

Dear Everybody,

People sometimes ask us why we charge one hourly rate at our Portland Computer Repair company instead of a fixed fee rate that some other companies charge. We do this for three reasons. First, computers rarely have one easily defined thing wrong with them, so it makes it difficult to figure out exactly how much to bill. Second, similar problems can take wildly different amounts of time to solve. Finally, customers rarely know whats wrong with their computers, so a fee schedule makes pricing more complicated without reducing customer anxiety.

A technician can rarely solve a computer problem with one answer. Computer problems are mutl-faceted, and any one problem can cause any number of other problems which also need to be solved. For example, today I fixed a computer with a damaged hard drive. I repaired the drive using software tools, but after the repair, the mouse did not work. So I then needed to troubleshoot and repair the mouse problem. After we got the mouse working again, we noticed that Windows Update did not work correctly. So then I worked to correct that problem. The one problem, a damaged hard drive, caused a whole host of problems that needed to be resolved. In a fixed fee system, this kind of solution could lead to conflict with the customer. Does the company just charge for hard drive repair, assuming the other problems are related? Or should the company try to charge a separate fee for each problem? Using an hourly system allows me to avoid ever having to make these decisions. However many hours the problem takes to solve, that is how many hours I bill the customer.

In addition to this problem, similar problems can take wildly different times to fix. Here, we get a key example from virus repair. Three days ago a woman brought in a computer infected with a virus. Using one scan that I loaded from windows, I eliminated the virus and returned her computer in 15 minutes. Another customer later that day had a much nastier virus. This virus would not allow any anti-virus to be installed or run, so I had to make an end run through a boot CD to even scan his hard drive. Then, my first choice virus scanner could not remove the files, so I had to create a custom batch file to automatically delete the files on reboot. Finally, there were some residual registry keys that needed to be deleted using HijackThis to actually fully remove the virus from the system. This solution took nearly 90 minutes, but technically both customers had the same problem: a virus. I see no reason why both customers should be charged the same amount for problems that take such different times to solve.

Finally, the most important problem with the system is that customers rarely know what is wrong with their computers. Many of our customers assume they have a virus problem when they have a hard drive problem, or they think they have a wireless network problem when they have a wireless driver problem. This means that a fixed fee system adds a lot more numbers to the page, without actually making the customers life any easier. At $70/hr, you might not know exactly whats wrong, but you know that is the only number you will have to deal with.

So, those are the reasons we made the choices we did, and we hope you support them as well!

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody In Portland Computer Repair Land,

Everyone knows already that computer viruses are bad, that you should have anti-virus protection, and that you should update and run your virus scanners regularly. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people “never quite get around to it.”

So today, in the vein of “maybe if I tell you a horrible story it will remind you to run a virus scan,” I present a horrible story that will hopefully give you a reason to run a virus scan. A customer recently came in with a major virus problem and when I checked his virus scan logs I could see the last time he ran virus scan was January of 2003. He said he had had problems for years, but that now he was unable to check his e-mail and so the viruses needed to be dealt with.

Fixing the viruses was not very difficult. We have good tools and I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I have seen most of the viruses out there. The problem came afterward: his e-mail still didn’t work. In fact, he could not log into any website that required a password. The problem is, virus removal only removes the virus. It does not undo the damage the virus did. One of the viruses on this computer tapped into what is called the “Microsoft Cryptographic Service,” which is responsible for encoding and decoding passwords and such (the virus did this so it could record the user’s passwords and transmit them to the virus owner). When the virus was removed, the service was damaged.

So even though we fixed the virus, the customer still couldn’t log in!

The story gets sad here because that is the end of it. The customer did not have enough RAM in his computer to run the neccesary repair program, so his only option is to re-install windows from scratch.

Because of a lack of an updated virus scanner, a virus got in. The virus damaged his Windows installation and, even when removed, the damage could not be undone. For lack of $35 in protection, this customer suffered $300 in damage.

Keep that in mind the next time you think you don’t have time to scan for viruses!  Keep in mind, also, that most virus scanners can be set to run automatically once a week, and also that you do not need to watch a virus scan happen. You can tell it to go, and then walk away to do other things, so it is really quite simple!

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody,

Today I would like to talk about an important issue that comes up here a few times a week: the question of when it is worth repairing and when it is time to send the machine to the recycling center. Many people don’t realize just how quickly laptops lose their value. A laptop you bought for $1,000 just three years ago might be worth as little as $200 today, and you need to consider that when deciding if its time to repair or upgrade.

There are a few things to consider when making a repair versus recycle decision. First, would the client benefit significantly from a new computer? For example, we have a client who does a lot of work in photoshop, and a fast computer is critical for working in photoshop. So when this client had a cracked screen ($250 to replace, including parts) on his $300 value laptop, we all decided it was in his best interests to buy a newer, faster machine.

On the flip side of that, however, many clients do not need a computer that is any faster or better than what they have. For another of our clients who uses her computer solely to e-mail her grandchildren, in that same situation we would probably recommend the screen replacement because there is no additional value in getting her a new laptop.

The second thing you have to consider is: how long is it going to be until something else breaks? For a low quality machine, like a dell D600 or anything built by Gateway, if it’s more than 3 years old it’s almost never worth repairing because it is going to break again soon. If I replace the hard drive in a three year old Gateway (about $200, including parts, labor, and data transfer from the old hard drive) I know that customer will be calling again within 6 months because something else has failed. In that case, it is not worth repairing.

Again, the flip side is that for a high quality laptop, like an IBM thinkpad or an HP business laptop, I know they are likely to last much longer. In that case I am much more likely to recommend replacing the one bad part because I have a much higher confidence that the rest of the machine has serious lifespan left in it.

Finally, the last thing to consider is simply the raw cost. Many of our clients are on a tight budget and do not have the kind of money necessary to buy a new laptop. Even a cheap new laptop will run about $500, and a good, high quality one that will last for 4-5 years costs $1,000. So, if the money simply isn’t there, even if it might not make sense otherwise, duct-taping a machine together so it keeps going can be the priority.

As an example, we recently had a client who needed a new laptop screen. The computer was old and pretty badly beat up, worth maybe $150, but the client simply did not have the money to buy a new laptop. For him, spending $200 to replace the screen was the best decision.

I would like to make one last point, by the way, for those who might be inclined to say, “why not just take that $200 and buy a used laptop?” The answer is simple: laptop lifespan depends a great deal on the owner. If you buy a used laptop, you have no way of knowing how it is has been treated, what has been done inside of it, or what kind of lifespan it has left. Many a sad client has bought a used laptop and then had it last for only a month or two before dying. I always think that it’s better to work with a machine you know than one you don’t.

Okay, so those are my thoughts on when to repair or not repair your machine. Thanks for reading!

-Zac

Hey Everybody,

Today I would like to talk about a tangential computer repair issue: smoking. Now, this is not a judgmental post. I couldn’t care less what you do to your own body, but smoking has a major impact on the lifespan of your computer. You see, computers all have fans (some computers have many of them) which draw air into the computer to cool the components. If you smoke near your computer, the fans will draw in the smoke and then the inside of your computer will get a brownish hue of sticky tobacco stuff. This coating of smoke residue makes the computer much harder to cool, which makes your fan work much harder, which makes you fan burn out much sooner. When your fan burns out your computer overheats and dies. In the past month we have had two separate clients who lost their computers to smoke-related dust problems. The first brought in a laptop that wouldn’t turn on; this problem was the result of a fan that had become so clogged with smoke particles that it fried itself and the computer with it. The second brought in a laptop that was running very slowly. Inside this computer we found a large ball of tobacco built up and wedged against the processor and blocking the heatsink.

So, feel free to smoke but please keep it away from your computers!

Thanks,

-Zac