Overcharging Article In Uk Newspapers

[JonnyRT]

Interesting article in a lot of the newspapers today about stores overcharging for repairs and not repairing problems correctly, both in the big high street stores and independents.

Article here.

 

[Kitten Kong]

Usual story here Jonny. Big stores are rip off's. They (investigators), generally don't tend to take their machines to the small guys (ie, the likes of us), because we will repair the machine at a good cost, and its not news worthy.

 

[Digital Sage]

No mention of what the fault was they created... it would be useful if we knew that!

 

[PCSupportGlasgow]

Usual story here Jonny. Big stores are rip off's. They (investigators), generally don't tend to take their machines to the small guys (ie, the likes of us), because we will repair the machine at a good cost, and its not news worthy.

Nige,

i've got to disagree with you yes there are many great independents but in general the computer repair industry is still the wild west out there in fact i would say it one of the few industries that has allowed itself to go backwards in skill levels and actually boast about it.

Far too many low quality, low skilled will never be a Tech even if trained till the apocalypse types out there calling themselves IT support companies. All you have to do is look at the amount of corner shops & even pizza/kebab shops (now how anyone would actually want to eat in these takeaways never mind have laptop repaired there is beyond anyone's guess.. and yes i know they shipped off to one of to a friend to do in some garage but it still shows their disdain for hygiene) offering computer repair and you will see how far the industry has fallen.


Yes we all know the big box stores techs are in general just there to make sales but the public doesn't and they actually think these places hire real techs who know what they are doing and are just an expensive option.

But what are the public's options? if you walk down any street in UK there will be the following types of store.... hairdressers, corner shop, bargain/quid store, mobile/computer repair, takeaway. So choice to most of them is big box store, back alley tech, gumtree cheapo, or take chance on one of the 100s who are listed in google.

Simply put until the public have actually hired a good tech they don't know the difference and think every tech on a similar level (we are sort of perceived as like hairdressers in that regard).

you could argue that this only on the domestic side of things but we are seeing more and more "allot of bull very little skill" creeping into the business market.

As for answers; who knows! and better people than me have tried to find them but at the end of the day these articles hinder every one of us (especially good techs) as it all part of the chip chip chip lowering perceptions.

 

[lcoughey]

Although I don't disagree that there are some serious issues within the industry, any news exposes that I've see tend to be done in a way that biases the viewer in with the knowledge of the issue. Here is one example from one done in Toronto a few years back:

The setup:
-local college tech copies a corrupt dll file into the windows directory
- system boots with a blue screen

Their expectation is that a tech should just run a windows repair install, which will replace the corrupt dll and all will be good.

However, the tech does not know that a corrupt file has been planted and only knows the symptoms. I personally think any tech that blindly starts with running a windows repair is the last technician that a client wants working on their computer.

Here is how I think a tech should approach, after asking questions about what lead up to the error, is the data on the drive backed up, etc.

1. Get a full sector-by-sector clone of the drive
- yes, I know that this takes too much time for some of you, but this will both backup the data and help determine if bad sectors are the root cause of the blue screen

2. Test the other hardware components, such as RAM, video and visually inspect that the capacitors are not bulging on the system board.

3. Now that you know that the foundation is solid, then start troubleshooting the OS issues

Basically, I think it is very rare that a random dll file is just going to go corrupt. They tend to be read-only files and there is no reason, to the best of my knowledge, why it should be rewritten with corrupt data.

I don't want a mechanic to tell me that my oil keeps going low and just topping it up. I want a mechanic that will tell me that my oil is going low because of a leak, show me where the leak is and then fix it.

 

[Sterling Archer]

How about the people that used to mess with the jumpers on IDE drives? Simple fix, but most people wouldn't think of checking that.

 

[Kitten Kong]

Nige,

i've got to disagree with you yes there are many great independents but in general the computer repair industry is still the wild west out there in fact i would say it one of the few industries that has allowed itself to go backwards in skill levels and actually boast about it.

Far too many low quality, low skilled will never be a Tech even if trained till the apocalypse types out there calling themselves IT support companies. All you have to do is look at the amount of corner shops & even pizza/kebab shops (now how anyone would actually want to eat in these takeaways never mind have laptop repaired there is beyond anyone's guess.. and yes i know they shipped off to one of to a friend to do in some garage but it still shows their disdain for hygiene) offering computer repair and you will see how far the industry has fallen.


Yes we all know the big box stores techs are in general just there to make sales but the public doesn't and they actually think these places hire real techs who know what they are doing and are just an expensive option.

But what are the public's options? if you walk down any street in UK there will be the following types of store.... hairdressers, corner shop, bargain/quid store, mobile/computer repair, takeaway. So choice to most of them is big box store, back alley tech, gumtree cheapo, or take chance on one of the 100s who are listed in google.

Simply put until the public have actually hired a good tech they don't know the difference and think every tech on a similar level (we are sort of perceived as like hairdressers in that regard).

you could argue that this only on the domestic side of things but we are seeing more and more "allot of bull very little skill" creeping into the business market.

As for answers; who knows! and better people than me have tried to find them but at the end of the day these articles hinder every one of us (especially good techs) as it all part of the chip chip chip lowering perceptions.

Hi Alex, by my previous comment,I meant the good independents, not those who run a IT bus from the back of a off licence or a coffee shop, but those of us who do do this for a living full time.

I know there are a huge number of IT pro's (self acclaimed) who couldn't remove themselves from a paper bag, yet alone remove a Trojan.

In one respect I wish we as a profession were somehow 'sanctioned'. Ie like a sparky, you can not connect to the mains fuse box without being certified, or a corgi registered gas fitter, that type of thing.

It would hopefully stop these fly by nights from making situations and computers worse than when they had their hands on it. But in saying that, who would joe public to go?

Those who are the cheapest, or those who are the best?. Very fine line to be drawn there.

 

[JustInspired]

Although I don't disagree that there are some serious issues within the industry, any news exposes that I've see tend to be done in a way that biases the viewer in with the knowledge of the issue. Here is one example from one done in Toronto a few years back:

The setup:
-local college tech copies a corrupt dll file into the windows directory
- system boots with a blue screen

Their expectation is that a tech should just run a windows repair install, which will replace the corrupt dll and all will be good.

However, the tech does not know that a corrupt file has been planted and only knows the symptoms. I personally think any tech that blindly starts with running a windows repair is the last technician that a client wants working on their computer.

Here is how I think a tech should approach, after asking questions about what lead up to the error, is the data on the drive backed up, etc.

1. Get a full sector-by-sector clone of the drive
- yes, I know that this takes too much time for some of you, but this will both backup the data and help determine if bad sectors are the root cause of the blue screen

2. Test the other hardware components, such as RAM, video and visually inspect that the capacitors are not bulging on the system board.

3. Now that you know that the foundation is solid, then start troubleshooting the OS issues

Basically, I think it is very rare that a random dll file is just going to go corrupt. They tend to be read-only files and there is no reason, to the best of my knowledge, why it should be rewritten with corrupt data.

I don't want a mechanic to tell me that my oil keeps going low and just topping it up. I want a mechanic that will tell me that my oil is going low because of a leak, show me where the leak is and then fix it.

Thank you for writing that all out. That is exactly my 'issue' with their 'software issue'.

The same for the ones who had switched jumpers on an IDE drive. How on God's Green Earth does a computer that was working properly suddenly develop a fault like 'jumper on the wrong pins' or something silly like that?

The software issue that they planted would be most unlikely to happen in real life unless there was an underlying reason. Virus? Bad RAM? Hard Drive going bad?

We're supposed to fix the symptoms and not the causes?

Any tech worth his salt will first IMAGE THE HARD DRIVE and then perform extensive hardware tests.

The 'scenarios' are mostly fairy-tale like and completely misleading.

Of course there are the obvious ones where you can tell all the tech or company wants to do is sell the customer a new PC/Hard Drive/ Windows/whatever but lumping everyone into the same category is grossly unfair.

 

[lcoughey]

I just found the YouTube link for the review I was referring to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDOKGbIUUZI

 

[bertie40]

I remember the IDE jumper "test".
It was an episode of "Watchdog" (a BBC consumer affairs program, hosted by Anne "weakest link" Robinson.

It portrayed a pensioner with a duff desktop machine, cutting a long story short, had the tech proclaiming a new hard drive was needed.

The TV "expert" had simply swapped some ide jumpers around.

And I remember thinking, "I would have been caught out by that".

(Ok, I would have taken the machine back to base, pull the drive and probably identify the fault, but still ..)

Would you expect (with respect), a pensioner to strip down his machine, unclip and remove the drive, swap the jumper and reassemble the whole thing ?

[emoji15]

 

[joydivision]

I remember at the time saying I would have declared the hard drive dead, taken it away for further diagnostics which would have involved salving the drive and I would have noticed then the jumpers were wrong. Of course at this moment I would have realised it was a stitch up.

It is like when they cut wires from boilers , wires don't have a habit of cutting them selves.

As for the article, it is nothing we don't already know.

 

[colonydata]

And in nine cases the repairers failed to fix the laptops altogether despite Which?’s test laboratory being able to repair them in minutes.

Was their test lab a blind test? if you put a corrupted DLL and know that it's easy to fix.