Some of you may or may not know that I own a small computer repair business North of Boston Ma. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how much money I make from people who being otherwise very intelligent are left quivering masses of fright by their unruly computers. I’ve come up with a few things that anyone who is feeling overwhelmed should do before calling a computer tech.

Take a deep breath a remind yourself it is not the end of the world

I know it’s frustrating when the computer goes down, but there is absolutely no need to panic. You don’t need to call me at 9:45 at night and talk to me for 45 minutes trying to convince me to drive 65 miles right then and there. Trust me your computer problems are going to be there at 9am in the morning. And no, I won’t cancel my other customer at 7am just to get to you earlier. I like you and all, but I don’t adore you.

Stop for a moment and recall exactly what you were doing just prior to the event

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s a pretty good chance that something you did caused the problem. This is just based on my own personal experience and it was quite likely unintentional on your part, but your the only one who knows what was going on so take a moment and think about it.

Write down what you remember because you won’t remember it when you have the tech on the phone

Once you get myself or another tech on the phone you aren’t going to remember everything you were doing. That is the kind of information that can help a tech get in and out in 20 minutes or spend hours diagnosing the problem. It’s up to you, but personally I charge $75 per hour (which oddly enough is on the low end around here) and I don’t know many people who want me to spend time I should be fixing diagnosing the problem.

If you see any error messages write those down (especially those)

Again it is a matter of having as much information ready for the technician as possible before they ever set foot in your home/office. As a technician and business owner I’d much rather spend 10 minutes fixing the problem you called about and the next 50 minutes fixing potential problems before they happen. After all I’m going to charge you for an hour so you might as well get the most you can out of it. If I’m stuck diagnosing the problem for hours because you didn’t bother taking a moment to get me the information I can’t give you that extra service. Then 2 months later something I could have caught and dealt with on the previous visit creeps up and costs you another $100+ service.

Spend some time researching any error messages and codes that you get. I use either Yahoo search, or google and just type in the error code and start searching. More often than not if you spend a few minutes you’ll find a solution to your problem. Even if you don’t know how to work the solution that’s ok. I do. Other techs do. Let us do it for you.

Finally we come to my last point…

If all of a sudden your computer just won’t start and it has been working fine check to make sure cords are plugged in, batteries are charged, and you haven’t accidentally left any discs in the drive!

Today was the 2nd time in the past week that I’ve made nearly 150.00 from on 3 minute call because the customer had a disc in the drive that shouldn’t have been there during bootup and the other customer had her computer unplugged to vacuum. A day or so later she went to use it and it didn’t do anything. She paid $105.00 for me to plug in a cord.

I suppose we can sum it up very nicely “Pay attention”!

When your computer goes down do you panic or just take it in stride? Is it unreasonable to assume that customers would like to save a few dollars by taking care of the stuff I mentioned?

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Tags: computers, it, technology