Bradley Chapple, IT Consultant & Owner of Aspen Computer Services, Loveland Colorado

Recently, I have been looking for some ways to help make things more efficient, here in my computer repair business.

Most of our clients know that we have a 3 hour cap on a residential single-computer repair or service jobs.

If this is the first you’ve heard of this “3 Hour Cap”… let me explain: It means, if the computer repair or service is being done on just one PC or laptop in a residential environment, we will only charge for 3 hours of labor… no matter how long it takes to repair the computer, remove the virus, repair XP, or solve whatever other glitch or problem the computer has.

The advantage here is that, in the clients’s eyes, labor will never get out of hand. Some of my clients have told me stories about how other computer repair shops would hand them a bill for $700 when the only thing wrong with the computer was a virus infection. Ouch.

There is just one problem with capping jobs to a 3 hour maximum….

MAKING $2.50 PER HOUR IS AWESOME

What a lot our clients do not know is that some of these jobs can take a LONG time.

A few of the more stubborn jobs have taken an entire 24-hour day of concentrated troubleshooting and numerous failed attempts at a resolution.  My techs can tell you some painful computer repair stories that involve DAYS of beating their heads against a stubborn/elusive problem.

On those longer (but capped) computer repair jobs, we aren’t even making enough money to put food on the table, much less stay in business!

Luckily for us, those jobs are few and far between. Our average job only takes about 1 to 2 hours, actually. A tough virus or spyware infection plus a computer clean-up/tune-up might take 2 to 4 hours, but that’s okay. If it goes over 3 hours, we cap it off at 3 hours labor, the client gets back a computer that runs like new, and everyone’s happy.

But, it’s those really tough (and unprofitable) jobs, combined with the 3 hour cap on labor, that has inspired us to seek out new ways of doing things around here…

GETTING BACK TO BASICS

Instead of running a virus scan from the infected machine, we usually yank the drive out and scan it from one of our shop machines.  This typically renders the virus inactive and allows our virus removal software to actually work.  It also allows us to remove locked files from the drive without the virus attempting to defend itself.

Another thing that we are doing more often is checking for a lot of other lower-level problems, such as visually inspecting the systemboard for bulging or burst capacitors, running Memtest, and running a complete health check on the hard drive with HDD Regenerator. These lower-level checks have saved us a lot of time in the long run… even if the computer problem LOOKS like an operating system issue, or a software glitch.

But, our attempt to make our business more efficient also led us to try Reimage, from http://www.reimage.com. Reimage claims to have the ability to check the operating system files, compare those files with an enormous database of Windows XP system files, and then correct what’s missing or corrupted.

Fair enough. That is sort of like using a “sfc /scannow” at the command prompt. But, it also has the ability to check for registry errors and damaged drivers, and fix those too. Hmmm… NOW we’re talking.

How has Reimage been working out for us so far?

NOT AS GOOD AS A HUMAN… BUT I’M STILL IMPRESSED

For the most part, we have found that the majority of problems that Reimage finds and repairs, we can do a little bit better ourselves. Nothing beats the excellent intuition of an experienced technician. After working on computers almost 20 years, those “gut feelings” have gotten pretty accurate when it comes to troubleshooting computer problems.

Example: I had a client’s computer here at our Loveland shop that was causing all sorts of havoc. It would turn on, boot to XP, start loading the system-tray icons and then crash. It would do the same thing in safe mode. I checked memory, hard drive, etc. Not even a full repair installation wouldn’t fix it. Long story short, the answer was a bad power supply. It seems that when the graphics card kicked into hi-res mode, it was pulling a little too much power for that power supply.

I’m not trying to brag. I’m merely noting that this problem looked like an XP problem, or perhaps a driver issue. Reimage would obviously not have been able to fix this particular issue. Tricky troubleshooting jobs like that one will always require that “fuzzy logic” which humans are better-known for.

With that said, Reimage has shown some amazing promise. We used it on a virus-infected machine what was so badly infected that it would not boot. It was throwing up a nasty BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) on every restart – even safe mode. By creating the XP Boot CD, I was able to boot to a workable interface on the infected machine. From there, I was able to connect to the Internet and run the Reimage utility. The program ran, scanned the system, even ran some basic benchmarking, and then rebooted to a working system. Eureka!

IT SPEEDS UP SLOW COMPUTERS, TOO!

Although I haven’t used Reimage to speed up a slow computer (I can do pretty well on that one), Reimage can supposedly do that too… and without having to make an XP Boot CD.

So, if you are curious as to how Reimage works, go to http://www.reimage.com and check it out.

Doing a free scan will tell you a lot about your system:  How much RAM you have, how much you NEED… your hard drive space, the health of your system overall.  It’s actually very informative.

If you read the Reimage website, you’ll start to think that this software can work miracles, but it won’t. Believe me.

But, with that being said, it’s worth a try… and it has a money-back guarantee (like us!), so there is no risk in trying it. It may just save you from having to receive a visit from one of our techs.