I don't know if this is location-specific, but I miss the times when PC technicians would actually try and diagnose problems.
Whenever a family member sends their PC to a "repair shop" (usually because "it was too slow") they get back a freshly-reinstalled PC and most of their files dumped inside a folder called "Backup". It then falls to me to reinstall all of their software while praying that their tax software has a "restore from copy" function or, failing that, at least a clearly-marked "database.db" file that I can overwrite.
This isn't a new phenomenon. In the mid 2000s I was working in a computer repair shop and similarly most of our fixes were just windows reinstalls with some light backup. Why? Because that fixed basically every software problem and was mostly unattended work so it didn't cost a lot.
Ultimately the customer wants the cheapest and fastest solution. They don't care that it was their limewire viruses or bonzai buddy IE extensions or whatever that slowed it down.
Here's the big kicker imo: If we were charging $100 for a reinstall/backup, and we could sell them a faster computer for $400, then there is very little wiggle room for real repair to happen. Parts + labor could easily exceed the cost of a new budget machine. If there isn't a RMA (free part replacement) involved, the repair probably wasn't worth it.
Yes. In the early 90s I did board level repairs on Amigas, the most fun was rewiring a board after someone spilt spaghetti sauce inside and just kept using it. Then ants got inside. It was like some sort of miniature world horror movie, mould, eaten traces, ants in dead poses from shorts.
Did a bathtub soap off and dry in oven, used alcohol to second wash, replaced like 4473838 billion caps, and had to rewire a few traces. Good times, and still cheaper than a replacement board.
(The soap ph was particularly important due to all the acidic leaking caps)
I worked as a repair tech for years, and I found that many performance problems could be fixed with that sysinternals startup tool (I forgot the name, it's been a long time) and just disabling stuff. This would be 5 minutes if you knew what you were doing.
The second was hardware issues, especially slow hard drives that started to fail but hadn't quite failed yet. There was a tool to read all data and print drops in performance (again, I forgot the name). This was before SSDs became commonplace – I don't know what it's like with SSDs.
I was as productive as anyone in terms of number of customers helped/week, but looking at my coworkers there were definitely two types of techs: the ones like me who knew what they were doing, and the ones who didn't. I know this sounds rather arrogant and pompous, but it's true.
As a company, you can give people the time and space to develop this know-how, or you can't, which is how you end up with "just reinstall shrug" type of repair shops. I was lucky enough to work at a small independent shop where we were given lots of free space and autonomy, and some of us took this to become pretty good at fixing stuff in short turnaround times, which benefited everyone.
We developed a bunch of internal tooling for this, too. I maintained Anduril, our FreeBSD-based live disk with tons of stuff (the company name was Aragorn, so this seemed like a good name).
Of course, this store no longer exists. Or rather, they pivoted to business support, because there's just no competing against the online stores with €10 profit margins on every laptop they sell, and there just aren't enough consumers to care about quality support to make the financials work out.
I don't know what the current situation is, but the amount of crapware back in the day was just staggering; every installer offered to "helpfully" install an extra toolbar or virus scanner or whatnot, which is how people ended up with 3 virus scanners and 8 toolbars in IE.
I mean, we absolutely did "Free PC Checkups" and obviously we knew how to tinker with startup and do virus and adware removal. These aren't some magical skills that only the rarest of employees knew, it was absolutely basic nerd knowledge that everyone who even applied knew front and back.
Back then of course adware/malware scanners were huge. We certainly did hook computers up and start a bevy of automated scanners and tools and fix performance issues. And every single time it cost a lot more labor and a lot more money to the customer. But it's up to them and a lot of people didn't want a reformat or had a more expensive computer that wasn't as economical to replace.
Believe me when I tell you that productivity wise, a guy reformatting 5 computers at once in an hour flat is lapping anyone who is spending multiple hours per computer running those scanners and tinkering setting by setting.
> Believe me when I tell you that productivity wise, a guy reformatting 5 computers at once in an hour flat is lapping anyone who is spending multiple hours per computer running those scanners and tinkering setting by setting.
You don't need multiple hours; that's my point. Hardware check (which you need to do in any case) + autoruns were all you needed in most cases.
I spent close to four years doing this as my full-time job. Our standard rate was €40 (a lot less than your $100 for a reinstall). We didn't go bankrupt.
> This isn't a new phenomenon. In the mid 2000s I was working in a computer repair shop and similarly most of our fixes were just windows reinstalls with some light backup. Why? Because that fixed basically every software problem and was mostly unattended work so it didn't cost a lot.
Surely that only counts if you actually execute on some light backup and restore? Like... if the computer isn't working, and you "fix" it and hand it back unable to run the software they had, I'm not sure that should count as "fixed".
I mean hell, this is how I do things at home with my gaming PC. All data is kept on SATA SSD's and the OS lives on an NVMe for this reason. If Windows runs into issues, nuke it, rebuild, start fresh. I have a powershell script that sets everything up for me and links the user folders back to the ones on the SATA disk, and then I just download steam and my games.
My rec time is limited, I'm not spending it troubleshooting bullshit. Like, I will a little? But if it turns into that weird genre of "well this app bumped this app and now I can't play this specific game while running discord without crashes" and the fixes involve enabling and disabling services or updating drivers or whatever the hell, nah. Reimage windows, off to the races.
during my short stint at a PC repair place the owner changed policies from "attempt to remove viruses" to "reformat/reinstall if more than 5 viruses reported". Shortly after, a customer came in with an urgent need to get their PC fixed, it had more than 5 viruses (maybe 20? who knows). I didn't reimage, because in SATA HDD days that would take quite a while. I booted the antivirus/repair CDROM that me and a coworker made, removed the viruses, rebooted into windows and let it do a scan too. The job was to remove the viruses, not find the underlying cause. Boss was out of the office thursday and friday, so we just did what the customer asked.
well this customer, who begged us to get this done, had some website or plugin or lord knows what that reinfected them, and they brought it back the following Monday and complained. I got fired for not following policy. Nevermind that reimaging wouldn't have fixed the stupid of this customer, they still would have brought it in on monday, but "we reformatted the drive" would have sufficed as "we did the work, you messed it up, pay us again."
ETA: we had a whiteboard with a "record virus count" and it was between 30 and 40 thousand infected files found when i left. I can understand reimaging with 30,000 infected files (at the time a default windows install was only about twice that number of files if memory serves, win11 has 134K files in c:\windows), but 20?
Although I find firing you for that silly and not a smart move from your boss the policy seems necessary after a few years in IT.
We don't even have a minimum amount of virus, if we or the client suspect there is, no matter what an anti virus program says, we format the computer. It's easier, faster and infallible, not like antivirus that take more time than a fresh install to run and can miss viruses.
I did tech support at different times for both retail customers and coworkers. For people's personal computers I'd make every effort to fix it as it was, and was usually pretty successful. Occasionally there'd be a virus too deep or the thing would be loaded up with so much bloat from the factory that a reinstall was easier, but I'd try to put files back in place and reinstall as many programs as I could.
When I was working company IT I'd just wipe and reimage. All their stuff was in OneDrive or Sharepoint, and 90% of the apps were in SCCM. That way I didn't have to worry about missing a problem or weird issues relating to updating instead of installing from scratch, and it was faster so they'd get back to work sooner anyway
Unless you are a software developer, then 90% of apps isn't in SCCM crapware and you don't put repos/ssh keys and other stuff in onedrive/sharepoint, and then setup after reimage takes half a day.
It's possible, but it'll cost you a lot more. It's cheaper to make backups and learn to restore from them, because your software is going to crash anyway, and your disk will die and take your most recent copy with it. Backups are your friends.
My friend recently had his 3090 die, and somebody was able to diagnose the problem and replace the dead components - but it cost something like £100. That makes sense for an item he bought for £600, but if it cost £10 for something, it makes more sense to replace it.
> It's cheaper to make backups and learn to restore from them, because your software is going to crash anyway, and your disk will die and take your most recent copy with it.
Just wondering what you'd get, if you take the above to an extreme?
A tiny, immutable OS core? Low-level libs/drivers cached from a network, 'installed' on-the-fly / loaded as needed upon reboot? Apps loaded & run from their distribution archives, without intermediate install step?
Sounds not too different from how computing was done in early days (apart from 'cache drivers from a network').
Makes one think what this "install software" nonsense is about, really.
(Frankly, default nixos already does a bit of the whole "apps aren't installed per se" thing - `nix shell nixpkgs#foo` gives you a shell with foo "installed" but only until you exit the shell and run garbage collection.)
I'll have to ask my friend, he sent his GPU to Wales for the repair.
Personally I'll happily spend a week fixing something purely out of spite, against all economic incentives, but I wouldn't want to do it for a job. I have in the past replaced a friend's SSD and recovered his data from the older one that he somehow reformatted by accident. But it's a lot of effort.
Isn't the problem that you need a very high qualified person for some issues?
If you survived messing with a virus, you could get a Windows evangelist to help you fix the mess, but that would be very expensive.
Noticing that you can replace the database.db usually requires some software engineering knowledge (understanding / guessing how things work).
I had a couple of issues regarding my desktop PC turning itself on. I diagnosed ethernet, windows, bios. Recently that PC died, so it must have been a hardware issue (I have yet to diagnose which part broke, sadly I suspect the motherboard), but the electrical issue could have been caused by that part.
I had a bunch of weird problems over the years that would have been really weird to diagnose.
As shitty as it is it's just capitalism. Clients want something fixed while paying as little as possible.
Meanwhile the stack of things that can go wrong grows to hardware malfuctions, firmware, os and app bugs plus issues that arise from between the chair and the monitor.
Finding the root cause, not always, but often enough takes time and time is money. Often not even the client cares about the root cause and less so if that means you are billing him all the hours.
I've logged tickets in an ISP testing performance issues by using GeForce NOW before. Peak-hours troubleshooting sitting alongside users while playing Fortnite over streaming to figure out where we were getting the latency spikes.
"Remember, kids -- the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down." --Adam Savage
> The Register itself uses the term Regomiser as a user name generator for its registration. If this contributor is a "reader Regomized as 'Felix,'" it would mean a reader registered and was reassigned that random name.
I recall there being a post on bash-dot-org (RIP) from an IT guy who needed high network traffic to diagnose some issue on the LAN. So his boss had everyone in the building start playing some old FPS(Unreal tournament?) to generate it.
Late 90s in a college computer lab about 20 people playing unreal tournament when lab tech storms in giving out about incorrect use of resources when one of the guys stood up and said we're the gaming society holding trials to form a team to play against another college, that was news to me, good times!
Previous job: "We need some more real & complex test code for that compiler, but it doesn't support all language features" - "okay, Linux is too huge, we already did a few real life libs like compression, encryption and sqlite... I'll port ioquake3 to it". I had to resort to GCC for some parts that could not be ported without disproportionate effort (graphics code iirc?); but once it built, it ran without error and I could play a few matches. At least that's what nostalgia tells me ;-)
Great story and conclusion that the problem got fixed.
> Have you had to play games as part of your tech support duties?
Well sort-of. My first co-op job was at the Ministry of Transportation. They had a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet that had planning costs for highway construction projects. All I had to do was add or fix up some of the formulas on them. All quite rudimentary, but it seemed at the time there really wasn't many in the office with 1-2-3 experience as the PC and software was new to the office.
So the rest of the time I chatted with folks and waited for the coffee+snack trolley to come around twice a day and otherwise take breaks. I got bored fast as there was no other work to do. One day I brought in my Atari 400 and just started writing games. The others seemed to enjoy seeing them too. Got a good work term review. They asked me if I knew any other smart candidates and I mentioned a friend of mine who was hired for the next term (after an initial mixup with another person with the same first/last, co-incidentally a classmate but not the friend I meant).
My buddy did his co-op at the ministry of transportation, and had a great time. My co-op was two floors down at the ministry of finance; a strictly no-fun zone.
Whenever a family member sends their PC to a "repair shop" (usually because "it was too slow") they get back a freshly-reinstalled PC and most of their files dumped inside a folder called "Backup". It then falls to me to reinstall all of their software while praying that their tax software has a "restore from copy" function or, failing that, at least a clearly-marked "database.db" file that I can overwrite.