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Getting Gouged by Geeks

What to do when your computer breaks

Avoid paying for repairs. Get a three-year warranty for your personal computer (PC). If one doesn’t come standard with your PC purchase, paying an additional fee for a quality warranty package can save you money in the long run. It’s ideal to get an extended warranty directly from the manufacturer, rather than the store you purchased it from, so you’re getting support from the company that built your system.

Prevent the most common problems. Technicians told us that problems caused by viruses and spyware are responsible for more than half of their business. Buying quality virus and spyware protection is a miniscule investment to make for your system. There are free programs on the Internet as well, such as AVG.

Protect your data. It’s impossible to predict when your PC will fail, so consistently back up your data. Most operating systems have an easy-to-use back up feature. Saving your personal files on CDs, external hard drives or USB thumb drives means you’re never in desperation, and at the mercy of a computer repair technician. Make it a routine chore, just like doing laundry.

Protect your privacy. Ask technicians you use if they have a privacy policy. Even then, there’s no guarentee, so if there are files on your computer you don’t want anyone to see, then take them off your computer and keep them on external data storage devices.

Your IT friend. Having a friend who really knows computers can save you a lot of money, but it can also cost you. If they’re unsure of the problem, they could make it even worse. If they do solve your dilemma, make it worth their while. Come up with a barter system or make them a nice dinner to ensure they help you the next time something goes wrong.

Get the most for your money. The CDs you bought that got your operating system (OS) up and running in the first place can also help down the road. Keep them handy. If your OS is acting up, the simplest fix might be your restore disc.

What’s the problem? Diagnosing what’s wrong with your computer is the first step. There are a tonne of tech advice sites on the web, or it could be as easy as using Google to search for your problem and solution.

You can also call your computer’s manufacturer or software support line. Even if your computer is no longer under warranty, they can give you advice and help steer you in the right direction at no cost. Finally, if you have to go to a repair shop, call more than one before you bring in your system.

Choosing a repair shop. Use shops that know your system. Some shops are specifically authorized to do repairs on your brand of PC, which means they likely have experience with hardware problems specific to your system. If it’s a software issue, ask them if they’re trained and familiar with the programs you use. Get the rates up front and a realistic time frame for the repair to be completed.

Posted on October 3, 2007
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Comments - Share your thoughts

Your recent show on computer repair outfits had no problems naming the trouble makers, which I appreciate. However, the business you put on the spot about the corrupt system file that actually nailed it should have been recognized too. Posted by: Rob | Oct 3, 07 08:01 PM

thank you for this show on computer fraud and unethical people. Buyer beware Posted by: Patrick madden | Oct 3, 07 08:14 PM

Thanks for show, the industry needed that. You also give some good, albeit cursory, suggestion. Your suggestion about manufacturer warranties could disserve people however. The phone support may be ok, but hardware issues are 'depot'. This means you bring or ship your computer to a depot. This is usually much slower and less convenient. A local repair or replacement is always better for hardware. Thank you. ComputerSteve Posted by: ComputerSteve | Oct 3, 07 08:24 PM

where did the CBC-critical comments just go? I saw 3 others that have just disappeared! Posted by: Concerned Consumer | Oct 3, 07 08:42 PM

I have a huge problem with your complaint about higher parts prices fom onsite techs then from buying them over the web. Once you factor in shipping and the fact that the techs CORRECTLY figured out the problem, HAD the part on hand, and replaced it immediately, so that your computer is working again, the hardware prices they charged were bargains. Remember, if you buy cheap memory online, you will have to install it yourself, and the people who need computer techs are likely the last people who would be comfortable installing these parts. A $25 fix??? That's laughable for someone who doesn't know how to fix their own computer. Posted by: Lloyd Johnston | Oct 4, 07 12:53 AM

Extended warranties? Give me a break! Buying an extended warranty ONLY covers hardware faults, and even then, they are priced at a 90% profit margin. If a piece of hardware is defective, it will go within the standard 1 year warranty. Self diagnosis of a computer repair issue is very much like figuring out what disease you have. Yeah, you can buy 256MB of RAM online for $25 (I don't think so) but you would have to deal with shipping costs, time for the RAM to actually arrive, then you have to install it yourself. $120 for 1GB of RAM installed was a bang on price for ONSITE work. Remember, you are paying for the convenience of having the immediate repair done without doing it yourself (if you could do it yourself, you wouldn't be calling a tech) or physically hauling it to a store and having it sit in the back room for a week. Remember: You often get what you pay for. That said, the $2000 estimate was ridiculous. Posted by: Deborah | Oct 4, 07 01:53 AM

A few of comments about your programme. I dislike how you call the guys who come onsite "geeks" - a negative term, and the Humber people "wizards" - a definatively positive word. Plus your smarmy, sarcastic tone while describing what the technicians were doing made me mute the television. Secondly, none of the technicians, including your Humber wizards, grounded themselves while working on your computer. Anyone knows that a static charge develops in the human body during any sort of movement, from scratching your face and walking across a room. This charge, if discharged on a computer component, will kill it. Immediately, without proper grounding. Thirdly, how much does your time cost? How much does the CBC pay you to run around the country spying on people? Now you understand why you were charged so much for ONSITE service. Posted by: bruce | Oct 4, 07 10:35 AM

I am an Engineer designing computer systemboard and video card. I watched this video online, I must say,I don't know who is the worst,the three so called experts at Humber College Institute, who intentionally put a piece blowned ram on the systemboard or the computer technicians. First about you don't put a ram that is already damage on a good motherboard, it might cause damage to the other components on the systemboard such as the capicitors. The fellow at Humber College Institude did not wear any anti-static protection when he installed the ram on the systemboard. I have problems with the experts than the computer technician. One of tech is right when he said it will cost $2,000 to do data recovery, for a home user, data might not be important to them, most of the files such as movies and mp3 are illegal downloaded anyway. But if you are belong to a corporation, say Accountant firm or Law Firm, you will be pay up to $5,000 to get the data back, I seem this before. Posted by: Allen Shore | Oct 4, 07 12:05 PM

Hardware parts prices, especially RAM change a lot over short time periods so the shows' comments on hardware prices are less than useful. Extended warranties are useless. Overhead is expensive and not talked about. (Vehicle/business insurance, fuel, etc.). And the reason we can't build computers for less than the big companies like Dell is because they get billions of dollars from companies like Google and Symantec to include their software with their computers. This business is way more complicated than the shows suggests. Posted by: John Vezina | Oct 4, 07 12:13 PM

Virus and spyware removal may be more than half of a repair tech industries job, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be better off being an antivirus software vendor. Think of it this way: 90$ a year for a "decent" antivirus program. This antivirus program will slow your computer down about 25% - search for "how antivirus affects computer speed" for an article by a well known commentator in the industry. When's the last time you've seen any antivirus program pop up and say they stopped a virus from getting on your computer? It's mostly that they found a harmless cookie that they decided to spread FUD about. If you get a virus once in two years on a single computer, then you paid $180 to have it removed. Any tech that can't remove that in half an hour isn't worth his weight in dirt. Avoid paying for repairs by buying extended warranties? When's the last time you've have helpful phone support? USB thumb drives are a great way to back things up, but instead of spending 50$ on a thumb drive every year that will be able to back up a decent amount of your files (and you don't want to write to a thumb drive weekly for more than a year and still think you can depend on it), why not spend 50$ a year on one of the many online backup systems that will save your butt when you realize you fell behind on your backups for the past month? Posted by: Dade | Oct 4, 07 12:20 PM

I appreciate your point about "What to do when your computer breaks - Your IT Friend". I work in IT and I had a coworker who was having problems with his home PC. I gave him some advise and offered to have a look. He did not have me help him out, but then his system died. They lost all their pictures of their new born child and his wife was upset. They called in help, the tech said the HDD was done and there was no way to recover the data. My coworker finally brought it to me. Within an hour I was able to recover his HDD and gave it back to him. I even spoke with a Nerds tech and was able to get his money back. So I was able to recover invaluable data and got his wasted money back and in return, my coworker never even bought me lunch! He is now on my black list - no more favors or advice. So all those who get help from someone they know. Keep it old school - appreciate what is given/done for you and show your gratitude!!! A simple free lunch is all it can take to keep your PC's up and running and supported. Posted by: Darcy Wall | Oct 4, 07 12:24 PM

Nice piece of sensationalizing! How much does the CBC markup the cost of advertising during the Marketplace program? You mean the cost of the filming crew's lunch is paid for by the advertisers!! How shocking!! You mean you don't work for free? Do you really believe that marking up a piece of hardware by 10 or 20 dollars to come on site and service a computer and answer all the clients questions is unreasonable? I also take issue with ANY tech who puts their pocketbook ahead of providing customers with service and value for their money. As a tech I hope that every customer I have is happy with the service I provide and feels the price is fair. I take extra steps to ensure this which includes follow up. I don't jump to conclusions when diagnosing and have been to a customers site for over 8 hours (over 2 days) and made as little as $75.00 which equates to under $10/hr Analyzing computer problems is NOT a science, especially when their are intermittent symptoms. In your example the techs should have unplugged all of the devices attached to the systems motherboard including the memory. Many motherboards will provide an error code when ram is bad or NOT installed. These system errors are provided to assist in determining the cause of problems. If the CBC wants something to report on why not take a crack at Lawyers? They are the only know profession who can charge for their mistakes and then charge to correct them. Want an example of that? Just ask me..... Posted by: John | Oct 4, 07 03:33 PM

Interesting piece, but flawed. First, $25 for the ram replacement is unrealistic, especially in the context shown. Second, the guy who did not charge for diagnostics should definitely had been reprimanded. It was not up to him to decide to give away free services. The piece definitely highlighted that there are a lot of incompetents and downright scammers out there, but it is tainted by its zeal outstripping its fairness. Like some of the incompetent techs highlighted, the piece takes shortcuts that undermine the work. Posted by: shulcher | Oct 6, 07 12:31 PM

I've been an electronics technician since 1974; started in the TV business, got into computers in the late 70's working on mainframes. I've worked in Telecom, and have transitioned into the IT world, and now work for software company. I have taught computer repair at the college level, and now teach technicians and engineers product specific courses. First, parts prices. With the commodotization of computers and parts, and the vast availability, you can get parts mail order at or below normal wholesale. Many of these discount parts are refurbished, or low end, low quality. Anyone making a service call will sell parts that are reliable, and will mark them up. This is only fair. You can't build a business on low quality parts. Buying a part for $40 and selling it for $80 is not unusual, or out of line. It costs money to purchase, and stock a supply of parts. If you have to invest $1000 out of your cash flow to stock a variety of parts, you have to sell a lot of them at $80 to cover your investment and start making money. This is not a charity. If someone knows enough to diagnose a problem, and select and install a quality part, they can save some money. If they don't know enough, they pay. Technical Qualifications: Of the people I have trained over the years, I would trust about 20% of them to work on a computer that I own. You got a 30% success rate. I wish I were surprised, but I am not. The entry qualifications to becoming a certified computer technician are ridiculously low -- hardly anyone knows anything about electricity or electronics. There is no entry requirement to these courses. If you have a heartbeat and a credit card, you can write the qualifying exam. You can find enough "practice" exams on the Internet to cram the answers, and become certified even if you don't know which end of screwdriver to hold. No high school diploma? No problem! Posted by: Rick Spencer | Oct 7, 07 12:09 AM

I thought the show was an excellent expose of the computer repair business. Auto mechanics, move over! To me, it seemed a lot of these guys were just trying to make a buck, probably not getting paid much -- I missed the beginning of the story, did you give any examples of their pay scale? The repairman that quoted $2,000 for the repair was probably trying to sway the customer with a ball-park estimate for recovering user data from a worst-case-scenario non-operating hard drive. In such a situation, the actual storage medium (platter) inside the dead drive is removed and transplanted into a working version of the exact same make and model drive so the data can be read and copied to either a new drive or a set of DVDs, etc. This type of work is traditionally done in clean-rooms, and expensive because the repair outfit must have available all those different drives, and is fairly labour-intensive. There is big difference between the cost of restoring a "non-operating" drive and a "non-booting" drive, though. In most cases of a drive failure, the drive will spin up, but not boot; chances are the data can be recovered by mounting the drive on another computer, which is what that particular technician did, I believe. How he missed a RAM failure is complete mystery, this is very basic PC stuff, but without seeing all the symptoms the repair people had to work with, it's hard to know the exact nature of his mistake. One point I must make. I don't think you can compare a $25 price for a commodity memory module from an on-line discounter with somebody who has come to your residence and installed it in your computer and made sure it's working properly, though. I should think it would cost $100 just to get somebody to turn up at the door.. Posted by: Peter North | Oct 8, 07 02:34 AM

I think the real story, the one that you missed, is why all of these computer problems in the first place? Hardware problems are only a small percentage of computer problems. So much so that many computer techs assume a software issue as first plan of attack. The real reason why so many desktop computer systems are 'borked' lies at the feet of a certain consumer grade Operating System. Yet this system comes with no warranty, or guarantee of performance. It has poor security and can be difficult for 'experts' to keep running let alone an average person. I turn down many requests a month to fix computers and the most common complaint is 'it runs slow'. Posted by: Jim | Oct 16, 07 05:10 PM

First off, well done in pointing out a major flaw in computer repair: People don't know jack about their computers. If they did, 40% of those firms would be out of work (corporate solutions aside). As the resident "IT guy" for my extended family and friends, I can say that it can get pretty heavy. You have a computer that's been out-of-date for months or years and a frantic relative going "fix it, now!". They expect you to fix the problem quickly and without cost (even if it takes hours). Also, if you go browsing online for fixes yourself, you might end up in the deep end very quickly. In any case, I don't think it's very fair to judge "IT fix" companies by how they find out if a RAM module is broken. When your computer fans start up, but you get nothing else, there are three things that can be broken: your motherboard, your processor or your RAM. All of these must be painstakingly tested with a replacement if you want to find out which. On-site, that means dragging along at least one each of; (for memory) SDRAM, DDR, RDRAM, DDR2, DDR3, (for motherboards and CPUs) Sockets 563, 754, 939, 940, A, AM2, F, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 370, 423, 478, 479, 486, 495, 499, 603, PAC418, PAC611, M, N, P, Slots 1, 2, A, B (list abridged from Wikipedia -- and yes, that means a processor AND a motherboard for each). Even accounting for redundant slots that means a van or a cart. Doable? Sure. Feasible? Probably not. In any case, it most certainly is NOT an "easy $25 fix". Motherboards tend to have low life expectancies due to low quality capacitors. As we see from the show, 5 out of 10 companies suggested motherboard or processor as the problem). You also have one guy apparently explaining data retrieval. Yes, it can be $2000 or more. Lastly, IMO the single most important feature in any computer connected to the Internet is a firewall. Over the last 7 years I have had one(1) virus on my computer, which invaded when my old firewall crashed for two minutes. Posted by: Markus Hietava | Oct 28, 07 11:28 AM

I watched the video online. Here are my tips (after 40 years in the computer industry) 1. Maintain a current backup of all important data (email, favorites, video, music, email, private/legal documents, accounts and passwords) 2. Maintain antivirus support 3. Get a fixed price for repair diagnostics and then an estimate for repairs 4. Entry level computers can be purchased for under $500 with a 1 year warranty. It may be better to buy new rather than repair an old machine. While the facts in the video are true, it's not that easy to diagnose the problems that were present. Memory problems are hard to detect and may take some time to discover using diagnostic programs. Once the problem is found the repair is to replace the part and rerun the diagnostic tests test. Memory problems can be related to a faulty power supply, system board, or processor. Note computer are complex and contain billions of transistors, only one needs to break to cause a problem. Many computers have years of dust and animal hair build-up inside. This can cause overheating problems that can burn components out. It takes a half hour to properly remove dirt from older desktops. Home repairs are expensive. Costs include car, gas, insurance, parts, labour, and scheduling. Many times the computer has to go to the shop anyway. Get a reliable local repair shop and remove sensitive data. Assume that your data will be lost during repair. Network setup is the exception and must be done onsite. Posted by: David Wright | Nov 6, 07 08:30 PM

of course "geeks" will charge a premium for ONSITE work! Its called making a living! Trying to repair your old computer is going to cost more simply because of less available ram. I like to see market place try to find EDO ram for cheep! Finally the 6th version of windows is now on the market. You would think by now the average consumer would have got the message that windows is not good after Windows 2000 appeared! If you buy a computer that gets viruses just by looking at it then you are obviously at fault! Switch to Linux and or a Mac and you have won have the battle already! Do not smoke around the computer and remember to clean it and put quality parts in your machine and will run for along long time! Posted by: SolarisZen | Nov 21, 07 08:07 PM

Having been involved with PC's from the beginning of the age of personal computers and even designing both computer HW/SW, it is my humble opinion that the majority of computer owners are lucky their computers work as well as they do. Regardless of what fails the bottom line always leads back to recovering the USER'S data and app configurations. The BIG IT companies will normally only do a reload of OS and APPs for you. They short cut all software installations by using disk image technology which takes virtually no time (roughly 30-60 minute job) so if you don't maintain backups your data is toast. If you want to attempt to recover a crashed system be prepared to spend some major time. For example just removing a recent Trojan took me 10 hours. 10 hrs of time from most IT outlets would be more then the cost of a new computer. Once a Trojan is around for a while it usually becomes easier to remove as the Anti-virus companies eventually build removal tools, But you still need to spend time to isolate the type of virus plus finding a removal tool or instructions. It is certainly NOT fair to expect that throwing a GEEK at an issue is a black and white process. If we were dealing with simple devices that can be tested individually then yes one could expect finding and replacing a failed and or intermittent memory module taking next to no time. However, unless a memory module has totally failed it is very unlikely the best Tech out there would find a problem unless they spend an extended amount of time with a machine. There are way too many potential problems that can occur with a computer for anyone to even begin to say they are an expert. Certain companies have attempted to make computers "fool Proof or easier to use" but from my experience this paradigm is flawed. Posted by: Pat Akhurce | Nov 23, 07 07:02 PM

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