Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

Today I would like to discuss an important issue for the bike riding population of Portland – letting your laptop be turned on in your backpack.

I know, this sounds like a small thing, so what if the laptop accidently powers on in your backpack? Or so what if you thought you hit shut down and you restart instead?

The answer is overheating hell. Backpacks are tight, confined spaces, and your computer will quickly overheat and burn out. Make sure your computer is either asleep, or off before it goes in your pack. Please note that standby is not good enough, computers in standby have a strange habit of coming back on. Sleep or off are the two settings you can use when traveling with your computer in your pack.

Also, as a secondary note of caution, please don’t put your water bottle in the same pouch. If I had a nickle for every computer destroyed by an exploding water bottle that I’ve seen in the last 5 months, I’d have 15 cents. Granted, thats not a huge number, but still, for those three customers it was very, very unfortunate.

That is your PSA for the day! If you ride, keep the laptop off and stowed, and don’t put liquids anywhere near it.

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

We build a lot of custom computers for our clients, and one question comes up almost every time, “am I going to have to resinstall all of my programs on the new computer?” The answer, if you buy from Dell or HP, is yes. They just send you a new computer with a new operating system, and you’re on your own to get your data and programs onto the new machine.

Luckily, Happy Hamster has a better answer.  When we build a new computer, we are able to take a complete picture of your old hard drive, data and all, and simply move it over to the new machine. So, when you boot up your new computer, it will look identical to your old one, but go much, much faster.

There are three phases:

1) Uninstall conflict drivers.

The first step to getting this process done is to boot up your old computer, and uninstall the drivers for everything specific to that computer. A driver is basically a little instruction manual that gets installed on your computer and tells your operating system how to work with the various components you’ve installed in the computer. For example, if you have an Intel Pentium chip, your computer needs to be told how to use it. A driver is the set of instructions that tells your computer how to use its pieces.

Drivers can be bad news, though, when copying a hard drive. If your operating system has been told that it has an Intel Pentium chip, and it tries to use those instructions on your new computer, which may have an AMD Athlon chip, it will crash and die when we try to start it up.

So, our first step is to disable all the drivers that are specific to your old computer.

2) Make the physical copy

This is the easy part. Using a program called, “Acronis Easy Migrate” we can quickly and easily make a complete copy of your hard drive, even if the two drives are different sizes, or from different companies.

3) Install new drivers

Now, just like a new windows installation, we go through and install new drivers on your new computer. The only difference – all of your old programs, documents, etc, are exactly where you left them!

So the next time you need a new computer, give us a call, we can make the transition quickly and easily and save you the headaches of digging up CD Keys that you lost 5 years ago.

Thanks,

-Zac

Happy 600th caller!

Whew, I am beat after a very long day of phone calls, so I’ll just drop a quick note to say that today we had our 600th caller, and our 278th customer. This week is shaping up to be one of our biggest ever, and we’re burning all sorts of midnight oil keeping the machinery up and running.

I’ll be back with more useful tips and tricks once I get a breather, thanks everybody!

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Laptop Repair Land,

Today I want to answer a question that we get here from time to time: “do you take credit cards?” and explain my reasoning.

First, the short answer, no, we do not accept credit cards. Cash and check only please!

The longer reason though surprised one of my clients today, and it made me realize this might not be something thats widely known – credit cards cost a lot of money to accept. You see, as a consumer credit cards are free, we give them to the cashier at Whole Foods and our food costs the same as if we paid with cash, but it’s not the same to Whole Foods. Every time you swipe your card, the merchant loses 2-3% of the money to the credit card company.

Now I’ll be the first to agree, losing 2-3% would not be the end of the world, but I frankly hate the idea that I do all the work, and then the credit card companies get some of my money simply “because.” I do all the advertising, hire the technicians, work on the computers, make the phone calls, clean the office, take out the trash, and spend hair raising nights wondering if a particular trick will succesfully bring a hard drive back from the dead. So why, if I do all of the work, should the credit card companies get any of it? It’s not the raw total amount of cash involved, but rather the principle of the thing. It’s my money, they have done nothing to earn it or deserve it, and I refuse to give them any.

Thus, Happy Hamster Computer Repair will remain a cash/check only business as long as I am able. I respect there may come a certain size, if we have a retail store for example, where people simply expect credit cards to be accepted, and we’ll deal with that when the time comes, but until then, cash is king.

Thanks everybody.

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Laptop Repair Land,

I would like to follow up my previous post about laptop chargers with one quick note of warning. Universal charges are not, in fact, universal. They look fancy, and come with a lot of heads, but they still have their own specific voltage and ampres, and they don’t change to suit your computer. So, for example, if you have a Toshiba that requires 6.3 ampres, and you buy a universal that supplies 2.8 ampres, it will still fry your battery, even if you do put the right head on it.

Don’t be fooled by the term universal, that just means it comes with a lot of heads, not that it provides the right amount of laptop power.

Thanks everybody,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Laptop Repair Land,

Today I would like to talk about a little-known part of your laptop screen called the inverter. Most people don’t know that there are actually two pieces involved in making your screen function fully. First, there is the screen itself, which consists of layers of plastic and thousands of tiny liquid crystals (LCD = liquid crystal display) and is far and away the most celebrated piece of the assembly. It’s big, you see it all the time and it provides the pretty pictures.

BUT WAIT! There is another critical piece here. That piece is the inverter. The inverter is responsible for making your screen bright and pretty. The inverter provides power to the lamp (which is basically a very flat flashlight that shines at you from the back of your screen) making all of your pixels bright and pretty. Without an inverter you could, in a dark room, just barely make out your desktop and icons or you could see them if you used a flashlight and shone it directly at your screen.

This piece of knowledge can save you a lot of money. A customer called today and had this problem: his screen was very, very faint but he could see everything was there. Classic inverter issue. Unfortunately he called Dell tech support before he called us. Dell tech support told him the problem was his LCD. So this poor fellow replaced his LCD (a $100 part plus 1-2 hours of work to install on his part) and still had exactly the same problem! If he had known about inverters, he could have simply replaced that piece, at a cost of about $5-15, and an installation time of about 20-30 minutes.

So keep in mind, if your screen is ever dim-but-present, don’t replace the screen! Check the inverter first. It could save you a lot of Portland laptop repair money.

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Laptop Repair Land,

Today I want to talk about a very serious problem – laptop owners who use the wrong AC adapter for their computer. Let me give you a list of the things that can go wrong if you use the wrong AC adapter for your computer:

1) Burned out LCD screen

2) Burned out motherboard

3) Burned out hard drive

4) Burned out motherboard + hard drive + lcd screen + flames shooting from the keyboard

Yes, number four really did happen to somebody who called in this week.

The thing about it is, the manufacturers are tricky bastards. They play a trick and try to make it seem like if the plug is the same size, then it must work in any computer in which it will fit. They make it seem like anything from the same brand must work the same. These are untrue, and have cost customers a lot of money.

If you want to know if you can use a different AC adapter you need to look at the writting on the bottom of your old one and make sure that all the numbers, especially voltage and ampres output, are identical. Anything less and you can destroy your laptop.

Further, even if all numbers match, the plug must be the same size. If one forces too small a plug onto a big pin, or letting a big plug rattle around a small pin,  the DC jack will quickly snap off. Those things are really not held in very carefully at all, and they cost $100-150 to repair.

I don’t mean to sound so dire, but we’ve had several calls about this so far this week, and I don’t want anybody else to lose their data or their entire laptop over this issue! So please, use only an AC adapter that fits properly, and outputs the correct numbers.

Thanks everybody,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

Just wanted to update you all and say that things have calmed down here and we are now back to running at full strength. A long weekend gave us time to catch up on our backlog, and a new web ticketing system means that our techs are now better able to track their respective jobs and keep things better organized.

We are ready to move forward and fix even more computers!

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

I want to talk today about one of my favorite virus/spyware/scareware/malware removal tools – Mal Ware Bytes. You probably have never heard of it, because MWB is not a virus protection program, rather, it is the worlds most effective virus removal program. If you think you’ve got a virus, or any other kind of malware, simply log on to www.malwarebytes.org, download the free software, and click the one button required to make it run. About 7 times out of 10, that takes care of the problem right there. I always think that people should have it downloaded and installed on their computers, because some viruses prevent anti-virus from being installed. If you already have it installed, you can easily run it, remove the viruses, and move on with your life.

So give it a shot today, www.malwarebytes.org, and click on the big green “download now” button on the lower left side.

Thanks,

-Zac

Hey Everybody in Portland Computer Repair Land,

I would like to talk to you today about a problem I’ve seen a few times in the last week here in the office – people who are overspending on their computers. Many customers don’t realize that computers today are vastly cheaper than they were 5-10 years ago.

For example, a customer recently came in with a 9 year old computer. The computer had a dead motherboard, which is a fairly expensive repair. I told him the repair cost would be about $250 for parts and labor, but that I did not want to do the repair, because on a machine that old, it did not make economical sense. The customer was briefly confused, because, as he explained to me, since he had paid $1,200 for the computer, a $250 repair sounded fairly reasonable. I then explained to him that today I can build a complete computer that will be between 4x-6x faster than his existing computer, for only $400. The repair cost made sense compared to computer prices a decade ago, but not to computer prices today.

Another way this issue has the potential to hurt customers is if you buy a new computer under the assumption you need to spend about as much as you did on your last one. Recently a customer came in with a $1,150 computer that featured insane and extreme features like water cooling, two video cards, an eight point surround sound audio card and a terabyte hard drive. The machine looked like something you buy for your nerdy teenage kid, or something I would use personally to play video games. However, when I questioned the customer about what he used the computer for, he told me mostly he checked his e-mail and surfed the internet. The customer didn’t play video games, edit video, record sound, or do anything else that would require a machine of this power. He ended out with this extreme machine because his previous computer cost about $1,000, so when it came time to buy a new one, he decided he should probably spend about $1,000. I understood the logic behind the decision, but the resulting purchase cost the customer far more than he needed to spend. The customer overpaid for the machine in two ways: first, he did not need all of the fancy features he paid for, and second, the energy consumption of a machine this large with so many features will cost him dearly in electricity over the years.

The moral to take away here is that you can spend as little as $400 and get a machine today that will run at least 4x faster than anything built 8 years ago, and at least 2x as fast as anything built four years ago. (All of this assumes you stick with Windows XP. We won’t discuss Vista, because that changes everything dramatically, and frankly you don’t want Vista, nobody does.) The prices on many things have gone up, but each year computer prices actually go down.

So the next time you need a new computer, give us a call! We will walk you through your needs, and often times as the end of that discussion, people realize they can spend much less than they thought they would need to spend. Also, keep in mind that we can save your existing windows installation/programs/files entirely. You do not need to reinstall windows if you get a new custom computer.

Thanks Everybody,

-Zac