Slow week

ohio_grad_06

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Anyone else slow this past week? This past week we had 2 appointments leading up to mother's day. One was an existing customer, other one was a new client. Just seems slower for us than normal. Anyone else have this?
 
We are fairly busy. Lot's of business builds. Procrastinators from our original notification back in September/October about XP EOL. A few clients we have quotes with are actually calling stating they no longer need to replace the XP machines because MS published that update to fix IE, so they are good. :rolleyes: We had a couple of nice server projects this month too. One was an associate client we built a server for a few years ago. Server was acting up so we put a plan together to upgrade the hard drives and reload it with 2008R2. Their business line app is not supported on 2012. The original server was 2008. The VM would not start on the Datto appliance so we brought it back to the office, used disk2vhd and started the VM on our hyper-v server. Installed 2008R2 on the rebuilt server, then performed a migration. There were a couple of sketchy points along the way but everything worked out great in the end. We had replaced a failed hard drive in this server several months ago using Ghost to image it to a new drive. The server would not boot normally afterwards and we ended up booted in directory services restore mode to correct some database issues. We had the same issue with the VM after starting it on our hyper-v server. Something with this server just wasn't right. I've never run into imaging issues like that before. I'm puting finishing touches on a new hyper-v server this week for another client.
 
Maybe it's this area. Have contacted other businesses nearby here, and some that would do high volumes are saying they are also very slow. Not just computer repair but other types of businesses also.

The one I've got in right now came in a week ago today, failing hard drive on a desktop, but they want the data(the drive is a 500gb and failing). Started a sector by sector clone to an external, which has been going since tuesday. Saying it still has another day or 2 to go, which I'm glad for but annoyed as I have a brand new 1tb drive sitting ready to drop in it. I figure maybe mother's day week had something to do with being slow(we do more residential than business work, and were very busy earlier).
 
It's definitely a regional thing. The last few weeks have been quite busy on my end, and today has started out well too. A do go through dry spells, though. :rolleyes:
 
Slammin' jammin'
Just got back from a trip to a real estate attorneys office...onboarded as MSP, they needed documented network/workstation/data protection so they could interact with some banks.
 
At my location I'm bordering on too much work to even handle. I covered for another location today though, and had two jobs when I came in, fixed those, maybe three more simple jobs, and then left two more going overnight that should take the other guy all of an hour to finish up. I've heard another location is even slower (normal for us is about 10 jobs going at any given time). In my own location though, I expect to be getting a lot of calls from customers asking if we're done with their computer yet, since I wasn't there to do any of the hardware related stuff all day today. When I left Saturday I think I had 30 something jobs going, and while im sure my coworkers knocked out as many as they could, its entirely possible that we checked in more jobs than we checked out since Mondays are our busiest day.
 
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Slamming here too, Chris and I had a day today that about made me cry. Sold 12 GFI's yearly plans in 6 days. Yeah, I'm like WTF!

When it's slow for me, I work on marketing tactics. It makes me feel good even if it doesn't pick up right away. Also, I have learned I have about 4 slow periods a year, so I get used to noticing it the end of the first week and 2nd week I get going on marketing. By the third week I'm getting angry, but the 4th week it's all hot again.
 
Yay!

Yeah, last few days have been great for GFI sales .... been getting other clients of mine already using GFI on board with taking the annual plans vs higher monthly fees.

It's all about the 80/20. Sure, I'm happy doing the virus removals and the tuneups people love using us for, but we (and my clients) make alot more when we look at recurring payments like these ones falling into our laps.

All it takes is a good product, a knowledgeable sales person and a good pitch to win over a customer.
 
Maybe I'm taking your customers over here on the East Coast because not only has it been busy, I have had a lot of out of state customers.
 
Yeah who knows. Not sure why but after looking at things sends like May is traditionally a slow month. Maybe school letting out and folks trying to get out for vacation.
 
last mth was beyond dead both for our in store repairs and online sales via ebay or amazon i thought it was related to the tax season or something

in store i could understand, not sure why ebay took a huge hit dropped about 30% in sales

now things are climbing back though
 
Have been busy till a few days before Easter, then it fell off a cliff! Getting out again today cold calling on businesses. I have been trying to pay attention to the market and adjust. Don't do much break/fix anymore. Mostly virus & malware. How about you? Where is the market going?
 
At this point I'm mostly break/fix. But I'm the only tech guy now so by the time I do the residential stuff pretty well all my time is gone typically.
 
Ho hum. The computer I got in last monday(has been trying to create an image since last tuesday), still has a little under 24 hours to go. Hope this image restores lol:D
 
Ho hum. The computer I got in last monday(has been trying to create an image since last tuesday), still has a little under 24 hours to go. Hope this image restores lol:D

Disturbing. You just let it run for a week ? Did it produce any errors along the way ? :confused:
 
I'm using acronis. I have it doing a sector by sector copy skipping any bad ones it finds. Never had one take this long but it is a 500gb drive and is nearly totally full. I think it read the drive as 465gb with 427gb of data. Still has about 20 hours to go it states. At this point might as well let it finish. When they called me the pc was not booting. It would boot all the way to log in and come up with the cursor, but would not log in. I only ran the short gsmart test on the drive when I diagnosed it on site. When I got it back went straight for an image. But have no idea what they did to try and fix it before I got there. I think it's a younger guys old Dell gaming pc so don't know if they ran check disk or what.

So far the sector by sector copy has kept going. The hard drive light on the tower blinks every few seconds or so as does the external I have hooked to it, kind of rigged the external by putting a small fan next to it on low to make sure the external does not get to hot. But it appears to still be writing data. Hate to stop it as you don't know if you will have another shot at it.

I had hoped when I first started the image that it would get through the bad sectors and go quickly. Think the drive was in worse shape than I realized. But so far it has not stopped.
 
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