Let’s bust two myths about computer repair companies!
Ready? Curious?
Prepare yourself for when it happens to you and call computer repair professionals like us to rescue your computer.
After 15 years in the field of technology, I can tell you with certainty that there is no such a thing as a free diagnosis and neither a flat rate computer repair service! These are two myths that continue to exist and that I am going to debunk for your sake.
Whoever offers you that, is scamming you — is depreciating this job, doesn’t get ahead of the competition and neither gets more profitable.
Since the first day of starting my computer repair company, I chose honesty and never use sneaky sales schemes, bait and switch marketing techniques or outdated, harassing sale spiels with my clients.
Instead, I wanted transparency, straightforwardness, and I keep the clients best interest in mind.
Here, I show you why the free diagnosis of your computer is not free and does not exist (at least for most software repair issues), and why the flat fee computer repair makes no sense.
I wish to point out that the computer repair process is like an investigation, I consider myself and any professional IT, a detective, a problem solver.
Every case scenario is different and sometimes many troubleshooting stages, and several repair steps are necessary to remove the culprit(s). Because of this nature, it is not possible to predict an estimate, and offer the above myths.
To provide you with an example of the first myth, when the Windows OS gets corrupted, a PC Tech needs to spend a good bit of time troubleshooting the issue.
The fix is very quick afterwards, and it’s a rule-out process.
I say: 99% of the work is the diagnosis, 1% is the repair.
Another instance is:
One time I went to fix this computer in Melville for this kind woman.
She said that her desktop was very slow and needed cleaning (tune-up). At first glance, every aspect of Windows seemed to work, just very slow like she mentioned.
The firewall was on; the antivirus was active; Internet searches had no redirection to spyware or phishing sites and so on. If I only had followed the free diagnosis concept and spent only a few minutes, I would have come to the same conclusion as my client: “it only needs cleaning”.
However, when I started to look at the processes and services running in the background, I found tons of crapware and Trojans! On further analysis, she had hundreds of infections including backdoors, nasty adware and several internal security settings hijacked.
I could have charged her a tiny fee and left her with that quick tune-up but one week later or sooner she would have needed me back.
Needless to say, this would have caused aggravation and would have wasted our time, plus the disappointment.
Instead, I did not leave her computer in those seemingly okay conditions. I fixed it all and removed all the infections, installed a better and 100% free antivirus; last, I left her with best practices to keep away malware.
Yes, indeed, in the end, I charged her a little more but she held hundreds of videos and pictures of her two daughters. She never called me back except to thank me or to know how to use her iPad :).
This woman loves me, and every time she uses her computer, she is not cursing at me – so I say goodbye free diagnosis. I only recognise the full spectrum repair process instead — the one that requires some thinking and investigation.
The second myth is the FLAT RATE computer repair which is also advertised as:
“Come on in, one flat fee does it all”
or
“Call us, one flat fee no matter what your computer issue is”.
When I see this, I ask myself: Really? You mean to say that if my computer has viruses, Microsoft Office does not work, the computer gets hot – that you will do it all for this small, flat rate amount of money?
Wow! This PC tech must be Flash the superhero!
Choose the flat rate computer repair, and it will come back to bite you. A week later or sooner, issues will reappear like black magic.
These false, cheap and unrealistic promises on the part of the flat rate computer repair professionals and companies and free diagnosis translate into incompetence, faulty competition, and dishonest behaviour.
To wrap things up:
Free diagnosis and flat rate computer repair make the fast food of computer repair stores, and just like fast food, it sucks!
Thank you.
