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.

One of the hardest things I have to do is explain to people WHY their computer is so slow.

Without some background information about computers, cpus, memory, hard drives, etc… it’s difficult to convey the reasons behind dramatic decreases in performance without a full-blown class on computer basics.

One the most common questions people ask me is on the subject of defragging.

I get a lot of “What is a frag?”, or “Should I defrag?”, or “How often should I defrag my hard drive?”

Well before I get into the whys and hows… let’s start with a good explanation.

I like explanations that you can see in your head.

Let’s start by imagining that your computer is a large office building.

In this office, you have many filing cabinets, in every room, and on every floor.  In these filing cabinets, is where you keep your files.

Now, let’s say that for the sake of speed, everyone puts their documents in whatever filing cabinet is closest to them.  But, to keep track of where things are, they record the locations of the documents in a huge index book.  So whenever someone needs a file, they consult the book, find out where the file is, and then fetch it.

That’s not too bad, right?

It gets even better.

What if they went a step further and put different parts of a single file in different filing cabinets?

Even if they updated the huge book on a continuous basis, it would make things very complicated.

If your boss ever gave you a seemingly simple command, such as, “Please fetch me the file on XYZ, Inc,” you would have a real project ahead of you!  Let’s look at the steps this would take:

1. You would need to run over to the huge index book, find out where all the pieces of the file are located.
2. You would then need to take this information and gather all the pieces – one by one.  Each piece of the file might be in a different floor of the building, so this might take you a while.  There could be thousands of pieces to a single file.
3. You would then reassemble the pieces into something usable.  As stated in the previous step, some files may be separated into thousands of pieces.

Some would say that this is probably the most inefficient office filing system ever.

Well, surprise!  This is almost exactly how your computer stores data on the hard drive, and then retrieves the data when you need a file.

PROBLEMS CAUSED BY FILE FRAGMENTS

The only difference between our office example and your computer is that your computer can grab each piece much faster.  It might only take a high-speed computer a few milliseconds to gather each piece… and maybe a few milliseconds to reassemble the pieces.

But, consider that in a course of using a computer to accomplish a single task (checking your e-mail, for example) the computer is accessing hundreds of files.  All those extra milliseconds add up quickly.  Over time, this can slow a system down considerably… especially on a computer with an already slow hard drive.

If that weren’t bad enough, the extra work your computer’s hard drive does in scavenging for those bits and pieces will shorten it’s life.  Some experts estimate that a severely fragmented hard drive will shorten the life of a computer by 1 to 3 years.  You have backed up lately, right?

Even if this is an exaggeration, file fragmentation can still cause:

• Sluggish performance
• Slow boot
• Slow shutdowns
• Failed CD recording
• Slow or aborted backups
• Corrupted registry
• Freezes, lockups and crashes

Why so many problems?

The hard drive is one of the slowest components in your computer.  It’s the only major component of a computer that has moving parts.  That already makes it the bottleneck of most system operations.  If the system has a sufficient amount of RAM, it probably is THE bottleneck.  Slowing down a hard drive even more will bring a computer down to it’s knees.

It may sound strange, but file fragmentation was once considered an amazing feature.  Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) originally designed this method of organization as a key part of its RSX-11 operating system.  DEC designed this as answer to storage space “challenges”.  Hard drive space was VERY limited back in those days.

THE DEFRAGMENTATION DEBATE STILL RAGES ON

Defragmenting (often called “defragging”) a hard drive is like having a crew of people come into the office over the weekend, and reorganize those little pieces back into consolidated files.  So, when you come in on Monday morning, everything is in order.  When you need a file, all you have to do is consult the newly written index book, go fetch the single file, and use it.  No running all over the building to gather hundreds (or thousands) of pieces.

No reassembling, since it’s all in the same place.

It’s more efficient and fast.  How could it not be?

Despite the evidence in favor of defragmenting, there are still those who believe that it doesn’t do much.  This belief has been perpetuated by some rumors floating around the internet.

There was a rumor once, back when Windows XP was young, that fragmentation of the hard drive would no longer affect the performance of a computer.  Back then, the reasoning behind this myth was that the XP operating system was so efficient in managing and caching data.

Recently, it has been rumored that Microsoft stated that Vista did not need to be defragmented.

BOTH of these statements are FALSE.

Perhaps this belief has kept up isn’t momentum because the impact isn’t always so dramatic.  The difference defragging makes isn’t always night and day.  Sometimes a computer may have other problems, which affect the system in worse ways.  But defragging still makes a difference… especially with badly fragmented drives.  You’ll also see a big difference on slower drives.

Both XP and Vista need defragmenting.  In fact, both XP and Vista come with built-in defragmentation utilities!

Although these defragmentation tools aren’t as efficient or beneficial as some of the 3^rd party utilities, this fact alone should be enough to prove that Microsoft sees the value in defragmenting drives when needed.  Vista actually comes preconfigured with the defragmentation tool scheduled for once per week, showing that Microsoft has taken an even stronger stance on the importance of defragging.

THIRD PARTY TOOLS ARE BETTER

As mentioned above, Windows XP and Vista may have built-in tools for defragging the hard drive, there far better tools available.

The best one that I know of is called Diskeeper 2009 Professional Edition.  They are currently on Diskeeper 2009, but they have been around for a LONG time.  The Diskeeper corporation has essentially mastered the defragmentation process by defragging the hard drive in real time.

Basically, the program runs at a lower priority (in the background) and defrags your computer’s hard drive without affecting performance in any way.  As far as I know, no other program besides Tune-Up Utilities has this feature – especially not the built-in Windows defragmenter.

KEEPING YOUR FILES WITHIN EASY REACH

Here is where Diskeeper really shines.  Not only does Diskeeper reassemble the files on the hard drive, but it also does something better.

To increase performance even more, it monitors which files are accessed the most, and then rearranges those files in such a way that the most often accessed files are placed near each other.  Diskeeper calls this “Intelligent File Access Acceleration Sequencing Technology, or I-FAAST.”

In our office example above, it would be similar to keeping the most commonly needed files closest to your desk.  This decreases the time it takes to retrieve each file, giving your system a subtle but noticeable boost.  Unfortunately, Diskeeper only does this in it’s 2009 Professional Edition… not in it’s 2009 Home Edition.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS…

If you want to keep your hard drive data organized, extend the life of your computer, and make your entire computing experience better… you need to defrag your drive.

You can either do this manually or automatically.  The choice is yours.

If anyone ever gives me that choice, I choose the automatic method.  My life is complicated enough already!  It’s always better when I can simplify my life by getting a little more OFF my plate.

When it comes to automatic defragging, very little beats Diskeeper’s REAL-TIME defragmenting (although Tune-Up Utilities comes close).  What’s better than automatic AND immediate?  Not much could beat that except placing the commonly used files together on the hard for even faster access.  Oh wait, Diskeeper does that too!

Although Diskeeper comes in a 2009 Home Edition, I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it due to the absence of the I-FAAST feature.  The Home Edition also lacks the Frag Shield 2.0 feature, which keeps those critical system files from becoming fragmented.

So, stick with Diskeeper’s 2009 Professional Edition instead.  It’s only $59.95, which is a little more than the Home Edition, but it’s infinitely better.  It will be one of the best investments you can make in the health of your computer’s hard drive.