Computer repair shop woes

[SPAnDAU]

cnn.com had a link to an interesting article on pcworld.com about adventures in getting your system repaired. Their test scenario was to put a defective IDE cable into an older compaq system and disconnect the digital audio cable and see how the repair shops handled it.

The results were pretty dismal to say the least. I am the head tech at a small shop, and had a really hard time believing that these "certified" and even uncertified techs could not identify and fix the problem quickly.

Do any of you have any opinions or experiences with this?

Edit -- Guess I should give ya a link
http://www.pcworld.com/consumer/article/0,5120,17240+1+0,00.html

 

[IsOs]

We just have to be aware that this things happens and be very cautious. That's why we are lucky that we have this board to go to for help.

 

[eddie]

What really gets me is at a local B3st Buy they charge $45.00 labor for something as easy as installing a new cdrom.:Q ( Takes them at the most 10min to do, not that much labor )

 

[Mday]

jerky...

it was the only thing i thought of to say

 

[DO97]

$760 for a motherboard swap? That's ridiculous.

dave

 

[Gunbuster]

When does an IDE cable go bad in real life?

When does a CD audio cable just fall out?

I look for problems that actually occur in units when I do a Diag. not Connie Chung nightline boobytraps

Is it my fault people cant list the problems the unit has when they bring it in.

 

[Hyper99]

B$st B$y
is Best Buy
Oh i mean, um Best BUY
is B$$$ B$$
They are retailer, they have high overhead,
have many stuff that returned and can't cut the price
much for you to save any at all.
A computer shop charges about the same amount
What can I say, if you can do it yourself and you know what you're doing, cool.
I can get mouse of 5 buck and small computer store,
8 buck for keyboards, 8 buck for amplified speaker.
30 buck for SBAWE64, 50 buck for SB-LIVE
34 bucks for 48X cdrom rom, at best buy you got to pay
the full prices, sorry bud don't save unless you buy opened
items is the only way to go.

 

[Hyper99]

Now to answer your question from the first post,
this problem requires guess work.
You will first think the harddrive is dead,
so you take out the harddrive and it work on another motherboard
hmm, then you have to think... must be the cable.
narrowed it down yeap...
The tech are good so I guess they would knew right away.

 

[Caitiff]

Gunbuster
I've been tekking for a few years now, and I have seen a couple of cables go bad, so it's not as uncommon as you might thing. As for the audio cable, it's not all THAT hard while you're in there installing new (insert h/w) to accidentally pull loose a cable. Generally, when I'm in someone elses system, I always check EVERY cable when I go to close the case. Experience has taught me that it's time well spent. Any reputable tech worthy of the name should be able to catch a loose or bad cable. Period.

 

[Train]

You can never really trust the media, i wouldnt be surprised if they went to 100 shops and only reported on the bad one they found. I tried to get best buy to fiz a zip drive i bought from them, they wanted $100 and said they "MIGHT" ba able to fix it, i was like ya right.

BUt in my expirience, most of these small shop techies are much more knowledgable then the guys working the repair desk at Best Buy.

 

[Stark]

I agree with gunbuster. I've seen this same setup in a few magazines. some actually took wire cutters and cut the ide cable. When would this ever happen to a computer? I guess it's possible if the owner is a complete moron (to cut the cable and not know about it). No wonder the shops tried to fleece the guy.

At the same time, I often replace the cables when troubleshooting. The most it's done is help identify loose connectors.

As for the article:


<< We tested the mettle of repair shops by disabling 18 identical three-year-old Compaq Pentium II PCs. >>

So the picked proprietary junk that nobody likes to work on. I'd bet you can't even replace the hard drives on these (easily) because of the stupid &quot;bios on hd&quot; recovery cd's. :|


<< Good technicians should be able to identify the problem and guide users through the solution--which is to reinstall the driver--over the phone. >>

And a smart customer would have called compaq. What is the tech supposed to say? &quot;Um, you need to go to compaq's website and get the driver. Their site sucks, so good luck.&quot; I thought the point of having a shop was to attract paying customers to pay the rent. Not to provide free phone support for compaq. :|


<< (We didn't mention this symptom; we wanted to see if the stores' technicians would be attentive enough to notice the loose cable.) >>

If a customer came in not knowing they had diconnected a cable inside their own computer, I would spend plenty of time checking for other things they didn't know they did. And I would want to get paid for that time. :|

 

[larrymoencurly]

A year ago, a TV station (Phoenix) found about the same with several local repair shops, and all the station did was flip the voltage selection switch on back to 220V. Most shops didn't give the right diagnosis, and one insisted that the power supply had to be replaced, at $200.

 

[Bagheera]

They always charge $45 labors... No matter WHAT they do. It's dumb.

When I first moved to CA, I formatted my hard drive only to find out later that my BIOS can not boot from the CD-ROM. I had no friends and stuff because I just moved to the new address and was unable to borrow any utilities that can help my computer boot from a blank HD, so I asked a local store if they could load some files to my HD so I can boot again. Cool, a little work to make my CD-ROM being detected again costed $39, and the technitian was dumb enough to forget that he already took out a CD and left it on the desk. He kept on thinking that it's still in my computer and that my CD-ROM isn't spiting it out (it's a direct-insertion style CD-ROM with no trays, so...). He even gave my computer a few knock to try and make the CD-ROM to spit the CD out, yeah cool, that shows a lot of &quot;professionality&quot; and up yours, pal. I never visited that computer store ever since.

 

[BoberFett]

The disconnected audio cable is bullsh1t. It doesn't matter what you're fixing, a computer, car, or human body, if they don't tell you the symptom (no CD audio) how the @!#$ are you supposed to fix it? When they say disconnected, do they mean a loose end dangling in the case or just pulled it out slightly? I've seen these types of reports before and they look like as much of a scam as some of the computer shops pull.

 

[SPAnDAU]

A lot of times I've found that it can really save you some hassle when you are done fixing a system if you test most basic functions before it leaves. ie. CD Audio, plays wave files, reads all disk drives etc.

Regardless, if you are really busy and have 10 systems to fix, you will only test and fix the described problems, so the cd audio cable in thier test was a little inappropriate.

Two more questions:

1) What kind of turnaround time do you have at your shops?? At mine it's about 1-2 days, sometimes more.


2) Do you backup the customers data? I don't do it because if the backup doesn't work, then that leaves me in an awkward situation.

 

[Russ]

One of the things I automatically do is check the audio cable. You know why? I've seen too many Packard Bells, with the warranty sticker STILL sealed, that left the factory with the cable disconnected.

Russ, NCNE

 

[resinboy]

I run an automotive repair shop that has been in my family since the late 1940's. We are a Mom and Pop operation, spending a ton of dough trying to stay up with the technology. I am constantly attending clinics and seminars, trying to better myself.
We have a joke amongst us here about having customers signing a &quot;full disclosure&quot; statement when leaving a car for repair. I have lost count of how many times you don't get the complete story of what happened, or what the car is doing, until the 2nd or 3rd phone conversation. And I totally agree with the above comments, about being busy, and concentrating on the hardware complaint. We'll have a car in for a State Inspection, and the customer will pick it up at the end of the day and say &quot; so, did you find what that buzzing noise under my dash is?&quot;. If people would just spit it out, tell ya what the symptoms are, or better yet, what they were screwing with that they shouldn't have touched, it would save them time and money. I'm sure you computer techs run into the same thing. Back before i could solve most of my own problems, if I brought my tower into a shop, i would tell the guy EXACTLY what I was doing at the time the problems showed up. I'm sure the techs here have the same problems that I do, in getting paid for what you know, not for what you do.

 

[BoberFett]

resinboy

EXACTLY!

BTW, awesome sig. It goes to 11, LOL.

 

[Vinny N]

SPAnDAU:

1) 2-3 days, no more than 4-5, often 1 if there isn't any off lease equipment to audit(there usually is)

2) Well if the problem the system came in for, was data corruption/suspect bad hdd/etc then a backup would be attempted with no guarantees promised. No standard backup is done before work begins.

As for the IDE cable, it's a little odd but think it was a fair problem. As for the audio cable, that wouldn't have been missed. Standard procedure on all first-time repairs is a complete audit(specs, free hdd space, modem working?, sound working?, cd audio working? AV software up to date?,etc), either during or after the repairs.

 

[MrChicken]

I have fixed a lot of PC's (vast understatement), even spent a summer helping a guy at a store out.
Most of the problems with good service come down to this, money.

Often people would come in with horror stories just like in the article. I'd take a look and fix and test 90%+ in less than an hour. The customer would be amazed and ask why the other places couldnt do that. I'd tell them it boils down to money.

I work on computers for living, get paid very well for it, and fix pc's for fun. In fact I didnt even get paid by the owner of the shop that summer. So these customers got the benefit of a highly skilled, experienced, and interested repair person. Could the owner of the store have afforded to have me work there as an employee? Not a chance. He could afford $7 or $8 an hour techs to meet his labor rate of $30 an hour for repairs and hope to make any money, and even then it wouldnt be a lot of maney. It seems that you could do really well on that $22 an hour difference, but any one that has run a business will tell you it isnt that easy. Employee benefits, utilities, rent, tools, slack time when no work is available, etc really eat into that $22.

The other money part is that PC repairs easily reach the point where most people wont pay for them. Say you charge $30 an hour for labor, and you get a problem that takes 10 hours to fix, dont forget the time you spend testing it. Now consider if they need parts on top that big labor bill. The pc is already a year or three old, new pc's can be had for just a little more than that $300. Now you have a screamimg customer, so what do you do? Well you should have called the cust when you reached the agreed maximum price, and lets say it $150. No you've put in 5 hours and it isnt fixed, you going to charge them? How much? What would you as a customer think? If you think this an unrealistic scenario, take a look at some the threads on installing video cards. &quot;I bought a new whiz-bang 3D card and now the pc crashes twice a day, how much to fix it?&quot; Ughhh.... How do you get payed enough to justify the hours you spend trying to make it crash to be sure it works? It's a no win situation, loose your butt on the job, send the customer away as you refuse to work on it (&quot;dont take it there, they cant fix anything!&quot.

The customer base will not pay the price to have very good techs fix their pc's, that is really the bottom line. You can get lucky and find that place you go to does have a very good tech working at that $25 an hour rate, but I wouldnt bet on that happening. IMHO, your best bet is to go to the shop that has one guy working there, he's the guy owns the place and probably knows what he is doing. But its more likely you are going to run into techs that are inexperienced, and because the pay is low, they wont be there for long because as soon as they become skilled they will get a better paying job.

 

[Angrymarshmello]

I agree about the audio cable being unplugged - if the customer does not complain about music CDs not playing, why is the shop obligated to fix a problem they are not supposed to fix? I have a few loose wires I disconnected on purpose, if for some godly reason I took it to a pc repair shop (this would have to be for some extreme reason) and they plugged them back in, I'd be extremely pissed they fooled around with my setup.

The IDE cable thing is one of the easiest problems to diagnose. Pretty scary.

 

[Modus]

MrChicken,

Those are wise, wise words.

There's just no way some computer problems can be fixed economically. Your example of an unstable 3D gaming rig is extremely appropriate: the ammount of time spent trying to duplicate the problem, paid for at full labor rate by an experienced, knowledegable tech is completely prohibitive. A slightly better approach is the &quot;try a million different tweaks and send him home to test it himself&quot; routine, but this invariably results in half a dozen return trips from an irate customer.

Another tech nightmare is the customer who brings in a system where Windows won't boot, and he needs it fixed ASAP, without loosing his data. Problem with Windows is that, even with Safe Mode, it's almost impossible to determine what's causing the blue screen/protection error/lockup, so the only solution is a complete format and reinstall, which would kill the customer's data. And of course, his data is not stored properly in single folder, it's all over the place -- assuming he even knows the difference between a program and a document. So here you are trying to please this idiot, and all they know is that:

&quot;I need my Microsoft Word.&quot;

&quot;Do you mean the program itself or your documents or both?&quot;

&quot;Huh?&quot;

&quot;Alright. Do you have the original Office CD?&quot;

&quot;I think my friend loaded it in. . .&quot;

&quot;Well if you don't have the CD, I can't replace the program.&quot;

&quot;Can't you just take it off the hard drive before you erase everything?&quot;

&quot;No, Windows programs aren't like that. Their files are everywhere. You can't just take the one folder.&quot;

&quot;Folder?&quot;

&quot;Nevermind. Do you know some one who could lend you the Office disk after we reformat?&quot;

&quot;No, he was killed trying to swallow an ice cube.&quot;

&quot;OK, well I'm not sure what I can tell you.&quot;

&quot;So you can't do anything for me? I have an afidavit I have to submit tomorrow and it's in Microsoft Word and it's really important and if I don't hand it in I'll be subpoenaed and I'll lose my job and my house and my children will drop out of school and my wife will leave me and my goldfish might die.&quot;

&quot;I'm sorry sir, but I can't help you unless you have original discs for all your programs and you can show me where your important documents are for me to copy them off.&quot;

&quot;You're no help at all, are you?&quot;

&quot;Well, I did outline the entire solution to your problem, and I did spend an hour looking at your system and explaining the situation to you. I'm sorry we couldn't resolve this issue. There will be a standard labor charge for our services.&quot;

&quot;Charge? Money? You didn't even fix anything!&quot;

&quot;Actually I'm extremely close to the solution, it's just that we're missing a few key things.&quot;

&quot;But how can you charge me for that?&quot;

&quot;With an invoice. Like this one. Sign here please.&quot;

&quot;But I bought a mouse pad from you six years ago! Doesn't that entitle me to free tech support on systems you didn't build?&quot;

*CRACK* as the tech blows his own brains out all over the PC *SPLAT*

Modus

 

[THELAIR]

OOOH mman!! Modus... HEAR HEAR!! i was clapping when the guts hit the screen!! man oh man, is that EVER so true... its almost scarry


good job

 

[compuwiz1]

I have kind of a bizaar one going right now. This lady has me build a system so her Daughter can use it for business related functions. After much discussion, we agree on a good midtower and I put in it an MSI 6309, Celeron 566, 128mb ram, Cdrom, TNT Vanta card (so so, but ok for what she said), an Aureal Sound card, PCI LT winmodem and a nic, just in case. Win98, Works and a few misc utilities were installed also.
The daughter is kind of a newbie, but had some experience. Anyway, she calls me up and says I sold her a POS, that the kids can't play their games on it, etc. I asked what is happening. She can't tell me other than they get lockups. She can't tell me what games and I have no idea how they are going about this. I did find out they were old games back from when they had windows 3.1
I told her, for one, when I build a gaming rig, it is built slightly differently than a business machine, but other things such as monitor resolutions, refresh rates, etc, could also have a bearing.

3months go by, then she calls me and says they can't use that machine, so I went out and bought them a Compaq! I said, what????
She said, yeah, now the kids can play their games and they get a 3 year warranty. She also demanded that I buy back the system I built for her, refunding all her money she paid for it. I was fumed. I said, you didn't even consult me before doing that! I also informed her that we could have just upgraded the Video card and made the system work.
I basically had to tell her that I am under no obligation to bear the consequences of the decision she made without me. This is not over, the last email she wrote me, she just left me with the demand that I sell it and get her all her money back. What would you do? I know I've done nothing wrong. It works as it is supposed to.

 

[Mem]

You know the old saying &quot;want a job done right, do it yourself&quot; anyway I like most Members here I do my own upgrades but have found a nice little computer shop very close by (handy for spare parts) &amp; got talking to the chief tech,he let me watch them repair a PC once everthing is working they leave it on for at least an hour,then they check everthing floppy,cdrom, give it a reboot etc a full checkup,I was impressed to say the least,I ask him what was wrong with the PC in the first place,&quot;just a faulty PSU &amp; floppydrive &quot; ,I would have no problem taking my PC to them if I was clueless on computers.It`s important PC users find a decent repair shop or learn the hardway &amp; do it yourself.Btw I left smiling I came out with free parts nothing special just lots of screws.