Watch the cowboys

I am just about to do my 700th of job being self employed in the IT Support industry. The job is a simple wireless card installation. However one of the things that has struck me during almost three years of doing this job is how many jobs I have to do because of other peoples mistakes.

It seems that some computer shops and mobile ‘PC Engineers’ seem to think that the answer to fixing any PC problem is to format it. In some cases if the windows operating system so badly corrupt due to viruses etc this is best option but in my opinion most of the time it is not.

I wish computer shops would stop charging people for formatting their PC as an answer to all cures, when the fault is hardware related all this will do is hide the fault for a few days.

So next time a computer shop says they have to format your computer (I.e re-install windows) ask them why. I myself format computers a lot as when viruses and spyware infections get so bad it is often the best solution but I always check to ensure the problem is not hardware related first.

Some tips to choosing a good IT support engineer :-

• Make sure they are local, if is no good somebody that lives 50 miles away to come out and fix your problem, they probably won’t want to come back if there are problems!


• Ask about how long they have been in business and what qualifications they have but check their website first as it may well answer these questions.


• Don’t antagonise them, ask them too many questions and they may put the phone down.


• Don’t ask them to bring the price down, if you are not happy with the prices they charge so else where, they are plenty of cowboys who will do the job cheaper.


• Make sure they have an address on their advertising material and also check they have a landline, if they have a mobile and no address there will be no come back if they destroy all your data or your best china!


• Don’t expect exact quotes on the phone, until they have seen the computer and diagnose the problem(s) it is impossible to give an exact quote. I once made the mistake of doing this and it meant I ended up making £30 on a six hour job.

I hope this post was useful and gives you a little bit of an insight into the mind of a computer engineer. There will be a lot more of this to come.