When you have a problem with your computer it is not always easy to know if it is bad enough to warrant contacting an engineer. Clearly if the machine is dead or freezing up so much as to be unusable then you should make that call. But what kind of response do you expect, what alternatives are out there and will they get your machine working again.
Lets have a look at some alternatives, the first being a computer repair shop. The great thing about these is that you see them and so you know where to go in case of a problem. A little research locally has shown that several shops have closed recently, expensive overheads, ie social charges are cited as the main reason and some of these shops were charging 40 to 50 euros an hour, heaven knows how much the shops that are still around charge. The other problem with them is that customers have complained at the time taken to get the machine back, over 6 weeks seems to be the average and some of the problems could have been sorted in minutes.
A relatively new phenomenon that is now available is a remote scan of your machine, this purports to do a great list of repairs and renewals but at around 50 euros a go seems a very expensive hit and miss affair and the worrying part is that it uses a registry cleaner which in my experience can be a computer killer.
The registry is the heart of your machine, it literally controls everything your machine does, get one line of code wrong and it could cause terminal damage to your machine.
Registry cleaners scan for errors in the registry and then provide you with a list of codes for you to decide which ones you want to fix. You need to look at each one and make sure if you authorise the change it will not have a devastating affect on the machine. This could take hours and even me with my years of experience would not attempt it. In most cases people will go for the fix all button and hope it is okay.
The number of times I have been faced by a computer that does not work due to a registry cleaner is more than a lot, I did it to my laptop a few years ago, a lesson well learned.
If the registry has been corrupted there are other ways of solving the problem, I would never use one on my machine ever again.
So in my opinion avoid any solution that works remotely or the kind where you buy a disc for 40 quid and it will make your computer run faster, avoid like the plague.
There is no substitute for an expert dealing with the specific problem and talking to you the owner of the machine on site where the computer is normally kept.
Lets have a look at some alternatives, the first being a computer repair shop. The great thing about these is that you see them and so you know where to go in case of a problem. A little research locally has shown that several shops have closed recently, expensive overheads, ie social charges are cited as the main reason and some of these shops were charging 40 to 50 euros an hour, heaven knows how much the shops that are still around charge. The other problem with them is that customers have complained at the time taken to get the machine back, over 6 weeks seems to be the average and some of the problems could have been sorted in minutes.
A relatively new phenomenon that is now available is a remote scan of your machine, this purports to do a great list of repairs and renewals but at around 50 euros a go seems a very expensive hit and miss affair and the worrying part is that it uses a registry cleaner which in my experience can be a computer killer.
The registry is the heart of your machine, it literally controls everything your machine does, get one line of code wrong and it could cause terminal damage to your machine.
Registry cleaners scan for errors in the registry and then provide you with a list of codes for you to decide which ones you want to fix. You need to look at each one and make sure if you authorise the change it will not have a devastating affect on the machine. This could take hours and even me with my years of experience would not attempt it. In most cases people will go for the fix all button and hope it is okay.
The number of times I have been faced by a computer that does not work due to a registry cleaner is more than a lot, I did it to my laptop a few years ago, a lesson well learned.
If the registry has been corrupted there are other ways of solving the problem, I would never use one on my machine ever again.
So in my opinion avoid any solution that works remotely or the kind where you buy a disc for 40 quid and it will make your computer run faster, avoid like the plague.
There is no substitute for an expert dealing with the specific problem and talking to you the owner of the machine on site where the computer is normally kept.
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