It seems like everyone has their own computer “expert.” Whether it’s a neighborhood kid, a cousin, a son or daughter, or the retired engineer next door, everyone seems to have a computer professional in their back pocket. Although some problems can be solved by these self-proclaimed experts, they may take longer or do more harm than good.
For example, a woman came to us with a damaged computer. Her neighbor, a retired electrical engineer, spent two hours trying to install additional memory into her computer. She finally brought it to us.
The “expert,” in this case, had tried to forcefully push the memory chip into its socket. The problem: He had it backwards. The notch for the memory chips are slightly off-center so you install it correctly. This “expert” had mangled one of the two memory sockets, the copper pins all jagged and loose. We had to sell the woman higher-capacity memory so she could get the memory she wanted in the one remaining good slot she had left.
A customer of ours who spends half their time in Florida arrived last month with a broken computer we had built them two years ago. Their computer “expert” in Florida had formatted their hard drives after giving up removing a nasty virus. Unfortunately, he did not know how to work with a mirrored hard drive RAID array (where two or more hard drives back each other up). He had to hire Geek Squad down there to show him how to do an F6 driver. (NOTE: All of my employees know how to do F6 drivers.) To add insult to injury, while trying to restore the customer’s files from an external hard drive, the external hard drive failed!
So, this broken computer arrives in Minnesota. Using our data recovery tools and experience, we recovered the customer’s files from both the formatted drives as well as the failed hard drive. The customer is now up and running but I wish I could have helped them remove the virus. This would have saved them the grief of reinstalling their programs, printers, network settings, e-mail settings, etc. Today, it is not just your personal files that are important but also the time it takes to install, activate and update all of your software programs and customize everything to your liking.
To be an expert, you must have years of experience and be actively involved with computers. I have colleagues who, after a year, are behind the curve on fixing and building computers. I have written 10 national books on computer repair and my employees and I are all seasoned veterans.
Strike Twice would like to be your computer expert. Like that bankruptcy lawyer slogan: Computers are all we do…and we do it well.