Have you been taken advantage of by a PC repair shop?
The other day I heard a funny anecdote that made me think that there is a very serious problem out there, let me explain, in my work I meet many different people and when they ask me what I do for a living I tell them “I’m a computer engineer”.
Then it all kicks off, usually something like this: “My computer was running slow so I put it in a shop and got it back and it cost me a fortune and 1 month later it’s as bad as ever.”
This is the question, how many times have you needed to print or email something before doing something and there you are 30 minutes later trying this or that? So what does he do? He puts it in the repair shop.
The problem is that not all engineers advise you to the best of their ability, so is it your fault for not asking the right questions or the engineers for simply fixing the fault and not evaluating the whole PC? I’ll walk you through a conversation that leads to me fixing the woman’s computer.
Sitting on the train talking with a lady that I see from time to time on the train, that day she asked me what I work for, I replied “I’m a computer engineer”, then she told me that an engineer had come to her house and took her PC and returned it to him, it cost over $200 and the computer still didn’t work very well.
I asked her the specification of her PC, unfortunately she didn’t know, after several more days she asked if she could have a look here PC and I agreed, when I checked here PC I found the following problems:
“Not enough RAM.
2 Viruses and 1 active spyware.
“A bad sector on the hard drive.
So if the PC was repaired less than 1 month ago, what happened? I asked the lady what was the original problem she was complaining about, she told the lady at the repair shop “my PC keeps restarting”.
When you take a PC into a repair shop, engineers are usually very busy people, so if they see a computer trouble sheet from the shop that says “PC keeps restarting,” they’ll do it.
“Change the memory.
” Check the processor fan to make sure the PC is not overheating
“Then restore the PC from the recovery CD
As these seem to be the most common problems, however, if the woman said “I want my memory and hard drive tested”, the problem would have been detected that she had bad sectors on her hard drive and it should be replaced.
The next problem was that the computer was slow, so when the woman told the lady at the computer store “my PC was really slow too”, the engineers probably thought that spyware or a virus was causing the PC to crash. rebooted, so they reinstalled the system. using the recovery cd both problems will be fixed.
What the woman should have said was something like “my PC is running slow and here are some examples please can you try?” E.g
“Firefox takes 26 seconds to open
“Outlook Express takes 15 seconds to open
The andrew.gif image takes 42 seconds to open.
This would have given the engineers something to compare to, when I checked the woman’s computer it turned out it only had 192 megs of RAM 1*128 megs and 1*64 megs, I told the woman to put 512 megs in the computer for a fast personal computer.
Yes I can hear you all yelling “If the engineers did the job right they would have figured this out” and yes I agree 100% the problem is that more and more people are having similar problems when dealing with auto repair shops PC.
So my advice to everyone would be any problem you have, ask the question in a search engine followed by +forum for example.
Computer running slow + forum
This will usually lead you to websites that smart people visit and help you fix the problem(s) or give you a good idea of what to say to the first point of call at the PC repair shop.