Macon Computer Repair

Today, I began my drive to my office with an upset stomach after a night where sleep didn't come easily. After starting up my work computer, I had to leave for awhile to go to the bank, which is currently opening drive-through only at the same time I open. The bank tellers were kind enough to start work a few minutes before schedule, so I didn't have to wait very long. That was nice of them, and I considered it a payback of sorts because I also open my office a few minutes ea...rly on most days, especially if I see someone waiting outside. But the kicker and real reminder of just how nice people can be was when I stopped at McDonald's on the way back to my office. I pulled up at the end of a long line to place my order, and then found out that there was a delay at the head of the line. I ended up sitting there for the better part of ten minutes with no one moving. Just as I was truly regretting not passing by instead of stopping, the line began to move. At first, it seemed normal, but then it sped up. Cars were stopping at the payment window for a moment, then going straight to pickup and out almost without pause. When my turn came, I stopped to pay and the teller asked me which order was mine of two receipts she had. Then she handed me the receipt and told me it was paid. Turns out that a woman -- who was presumably responsible for the long holdup in the line -- had paid enough for a number of people behind to get their orders on her. That definitely made the morning a little brighter. It's things like that which make you realize that the country hasn't yet gone to hell in a handbasket. We're still just climbing into it. :D

Covid19. You can't go on the internet and not see something about it these days, and I guess it's my turn to post about it. I am asked fairly frequently if it's hurting my business. The answer is probably yes, but that's a qualified yes. It's the nature of computer repair that there will be times when I won't get much or any work in. For me to work, people have to have trouble with their computer(s). When people don't, I don't work. So periods of inactivity are something I ha...ve to expect, no matter how much they may hurt. In that respect, this is just another. On the other hand, computers are going to have problems regardless of whatever is happening socially. So that's a force driving business to me. Since I am a UPS package dropoff location, I have a need to be open for it. I also have a need to be open because my rent and bills aren't going to go away just because the government recommends that people stay home. For those and a few other reasons, I'm opening my shop every day as usual. I am getting work too. It may not be as much as I might have gotten if the epidemic weren't a thing, but any work is better than none. The federal government came up with a budget that was supposed to help small businesses keep their doors open, but the money from it disappeared in days. It turned out that a large amount of it was given to big companies. Go figure. But I looked at the rules for applying. Instead of being an outright grant, the money was officially a loan that might be forgiven if it was used for very specific purposes, such as paying employees to keep them from having to apply for unemployment insurance. A small business could not apply for it unless it had a minimum of two employees. Guess what that means for one-person businesses like mine? If you guess "We don't get any money, not even a loan", then give yourself a cookie. But I'm hanging in there, waiting for the day when this too shall pass.

Every year customers bring computers to me that are slow, unresponsive and loaded with malicious software. The computers have the hardware to run well, but don't. When I investigate the cause, I find that the owner, a family member, or a friend installed a second antivirus program. Sometimes there are even three or four. That leads me to the point of this post. When it comes to antivirus programs, more is most definitely not better. They interfere with each other, conflict, a...nd use up tremendous amounts of computing power fighting with each other, and that not only makes the computer behave badly, it also keeps the programs from doing their job of protecting the system from malicious software. The rule of thumb when it comes to malware protection is to only have one antivirus installed on a computer. This can be backed up by an antispyware program, and I recommend one of each. But two of any type of protection program is bad. There are exceptions. A few antivirus programs are made that are designed to be a second line of defense behind a main one. Malwarebytes Antimalware is one that comes to mind. If you want one, then read the description of the program carefully to ensure that it was made to do the job without messing up the computer. When you replace an antivirus program that has an expired license, uninstall the old one before installing the new one. If it doesn't uninstall from the control panel, most AV companies make uninstaller programs to pry them loose and a web search should find them. Stay away from uninstallers that were not made by the AV company.

I was making a deposit in my bank this morning, and overheard a teller speaking on the telephone. She told the person on the other end that it was safer to use credit cards on the internet (instead of debit cards that connect directly to one's account balance). This is true as far it goes, but using a credit card on the internet isn't particularly safe either. I can't even remember how often I've been contacted by criminals trying to buy computers with stolen credit card info...rmation. The teller's point was that stolen credit cards are insured and in case of theft, the owner loses no money. But better yet is not to give anyone your card or bank information in the first place, with just one exception. I've been using PayPal for decades for my online shopping. While its possible for them to be hacked, it isn't easy. Their business revolves around customer trust, so their security is as high as they can make it. They have my payment information, and when I make a purchase, they pay the seller and debit my account for the money. The seller never gets anything but my shipping information. That's as good as it currently gets. I can shop online using PayPal and rest assured that the hundreds of companies and individuals I've bought from are _not_ getting my bank info. The sellers know all about it too, and just about all of the major companies have PayPal integrated into their shopping cart systems. Which is good, since with rare exceptions, I won't shop with anyone who doesn't. PayPal isn't the only online payment system, but it's by far the biggest and most widely accepted. If you don't have an account with them and you're shopping online, you're taking needless risks.

I recently learned something interesting. For years, I've shopped on eBay and when searching for items, I'd run across inexpensive things that were priced over $900. I always wondered why someone would do that, since no one in their right mind would pay that much for, say, a computer sound expansion card. Turned out the reason was simple but not obvious. When a person has a listing with that much as the price, it means they are out of stock on the item, and they've jacked the... price up to astronomical levels so that no one orders one until they get more. That keeps the listing active on eBay, but inactive as far as shoppers are concerned. Since opening a new listing in eBay has a price tag attached, they save money by not allowing their listing to expire. Of course, that's technically against the eBay seller agreements because it's cheating *them* out of money, but apparently they don't go out of their way to crack down on the practice. In any case, that's one more mystery solved.

A recurring question I get is what to look for in a new computer, as far as the hardware goes. It's not really as complicated as it could be. It all depends on what you need it for. There are three main types of computer: consumer class, business class, and gaming class. Consumer class computers have components that are chosen to keep the cost low, and typically start around $300 for a desktop and $400 for a notebook for decent ones. What you want in one is a CPU/main process...or with a minimum of 2.2 GHz and two processing cores, 4GB of memory, and a 500GB hard drive. Anything more is good, but you don't really want less. Business class computers are made with better quality parts, but not cutting edge. They are intended to be more reliable than consumer grade computers. Prices tend to start around $400 for desktops, and a bit more than that for notebooks. The desirable hardware statistics are the same as consumer grade. As a general rule, I recommend this class as being best if you want a longer lasting computer that still won't cost too much. Gaming class computers are meant to be fast and to put up with demands for graphics and processing that the other two grades can't measure up to. These computers won't cost much if any less than $700 at the low end. Generally speaking, you want to get every bit of performance your budget will permit. For hardware, the lowest you really want the CPU to be is be 2.8 GHz with four processing cores, at least 8GB of memory, and a 500GB or larger hard drive, preferably a solid state drive. Gaming computers also need to have the best graphics card you can afford, and initially that's more important than more memory. Since games tend to take up a lot of space, especially if you record gameplay, a large capacity second hard drive is recommended. 1TB will do, but 2TB or more would be better. There are things you can do with the hard drives to improve computers. Using RAID, a method of making multiple hard drives do tricks, you can increase speed, make your computer safer against data loss, and a few other things. But when you're looking at those kinds of systems, you're going to pay much more.

I just got a call from one of my regular customers who had gotten a call from a person claiming to represent Microsoft. It was a telephone scammer, of course, but this time she was wise enough to ignore the caller and ask me to confirm her suspicion. That reminded me of another telephone scam that was popular a few years ago, and that might still be used today. In this scam, an older person will be called and told that the caller is the person's grandson, and that he'd gone o...n a trip to a foreign country and lost his money and passport, or had it stolen, or some variation of that. The caller would then say that he needed to have money sent to get home, usually thousands of dollars, and that it should be sent by a payment method that is hard to track. A variation of the scam is for the message to be sent by email. Either way, the scammer tries to act so pitiable that the victim doesn't think to verify the caller's identity or to find out if that person is really where they should be. Sadly, they are good enough at it that it sometimes works. If you should ever receive such a message, don't immediately respond. Tell the caller or message sender to give you a phone number you can call them back at, and then contact your family members to find out if the one they claim to be really did travel to a foreign country. If you can think of one, ask the caller a question that your family member would be the only one who knew the answer to. Always remember that the odds are very high that your family members are safe at home.

I'm always dismayed at how dishonest people in service industries can be. A customer came in with a computer for me to get running this week, and told me another company had told him it couldn't be repaired and that he should buy a new one from them. I started it up and the hard drive immediately protested. Loudly. So I pulled it, put a decent used drive in its place, and installed Windows on it. I had that "unrepairable" computer up to snuff with just a day's work. It was su...ch a good system that it flew through the program installations and updates that normally take me a day on their own. The only thing I can think of is that the other place wanted to sell their computer to him and keep the hardware of his system to sell to someone else. Any tech worth the money you pay him would have known instantly that the hard drive was gone. The noises it was making were unmistakable.

I work on tablets and cell phones, and that can be a major hassle. Recently, an Android tablet was brought in for a screen replacement. The screen had been shattered, which meant that the fragments had to be removed one by one from an extraordinarily strong adhesive. The adhesive was so strong that every time I tried to lift a section of the glass, it broke into smaller shards. To get the glass off turned out to be a matter of heating the edges of the screen and then removing... a few shards before it cooled down and needed to be reheated. There were hundreds of shards. Normally I can get my average job done in a few days. That tablet took me weeks to remove the screen, and the new one was only available from a couple of companies in China. So, when is it time to give up and buy a new device instead of repairing the old one? There are several factors. 1) Is there information on the device that cannot be accessed by hooking it up to a computer? 2) Does the device have sentimental value? 3) Was the device expensive? As a general rule, I recommend buying a new device or computer when the cost of repair exceeds 50% of its replacement cost. In the case of tablets, that's around $150. But sometimes there are factors that make the repair worthwhile even if it costs as much as a new device. That's up to the customer to decide. In the case of the above project, it was sentimental value that made the repair worthwhile. It wasn't an expensive tablet, and the work I put into it was much more valuable than the tablet was (I have flat-rate pricing. I balance out the value of my labor over the fact that some projects are fairly easy and others are pretty difficult). If it weren't for that, I'd have told her to get a new one.

I'm looking for a local tech who does in-home service to recommend. Because of a number of things -- the UPS dropoff service, my car's generally bad condition, and the need to keep up the fast turnarounds my shop is known for -- I only take on work where the customer brings me the job. I'm not going to recommend just anyone, though. I have no intention of damaging my reputation by telling people to use someone who overcharges, pads bills, shows up late or not at all, does a p...oor job, etcetera. The person I tell customers about needs to be ethical, skilled, and someone who takes pride in their work. I'm not looking for a formal arrangement or a partnership. I'll just keep business cards in my shop and tell people who call me looking for on-site service to call the person I pick. In return, I would expect that if the field tech runs into a job that isn't practical on site, he or she will recommend that the customer bring it to me. That assumes that it would take too much work or time for them to do it, of course.

There are times when I despise Apple... and then they do something that really disgusts me. Not necessarily for the products they make, although I have a few issues with their overall quality that arises from the fact that I work on them and know how they are put together, but rather for their cutthroat approach to raking in money. They charge extremely high prices for their products, and go out of their way to make you go to them for repairs so they can charge you even more....Continue reading

I've run into this before, so I knew off the top of my head what to do. A customer brought in a notebook with a touchscreen. The computer was going nuts, jerking the mouse cursor around the screen and showing patterns of what looked like raindrops. That behavior is a fault in the touchscreen, which is an overlay atop the LCD screen. It can be a sign that the touchscreen has a physical fault and needs to be replaced, which can mean the entire LCD screen assembly. Fortunately f...or my customer, this time it was just a fault in the touch screen driver. It was a hidden item in the list of human interface drivers in the device manager, so I had to change the view to find it, but after I deleted the driver and let the computer reinstall it, the problem behavior stopped. If it had been a physical fault, I would have had to disable the touch screen driver and they'd have ended up with just a normal display (unless they opted to replace the LCD).

I'm building a computer for one of my customers, from parts he supplied. Ran into an annoying problem along the way. He'd purchased an AMD Ryzen 7 2700 as the central processor, which is good. But he also bought a Gigabyte socket AM4 motherboard that said it was compatible with Ryzen processors. Turned out that was only partly true. I got the whole thing put together, and it wouldn't start. It powered on, and got the fans spinning... and that was it. It didn't POST, and didn'...t even kick the monitor out of low power mode. I tried all sorts of tricks to get it running, and none of them worked. So I went on Gigabyte's support forum and asked what I was missing. The answer was a sticker on the box the motherboard came in, which should have said "Ryzen 2000 Ready". The BIOS installed on the board was for an earlier generation of Ryzen, and couldn't work with the one my customer had bought. Since it didn't POST, there was no way to update the BIOS unless I got hold of an earlier processor, and I don't have any socket AM4 CPUs in my shop. In the end, my customer bought a different model of Gigabyte motherboard. I slapped that one in, and the computer was able to POST. The moral of this story is: Even when you think you've done all of your homework when selecting parts for a gaming computer, it's easy to make a mistake. He had thought that all the parts he'd ordered would work together, and only missed one detail. Because of it, he had to buy a different board and will now have to go through the hassle of returning the other one. See more

Mozilla Firefox is a good web browser, but when they changed its core programming to "quantum", they made just about all of the extensions incompatible. That matters because Firefox tends to have scrollbars that are difficult to use because the contrast between the button and background on them is poor. There were extensions that allowed you to fix that, but none of them work anymore and there aren't any new versions of the known ones. There are solutions, but the ones that a...ctually work involve programming things and / or editing the Windows registry. Not good -- that's beyond the ability of the average computer owner. But there is a solution that isn't difficult because Firefox picks up a few cues from Windows for its color choices. So, if you turn on Windows 10's high contrast settings, you can make Firefox display scrollbars that aren't hard to see. How? Click on your start button in the lower left corner of the desktop. Click on the gear-shaped options button. Click on the personalization button. Click on the colors option in the left menu. On the right side of the window, find and click on "high contrast settings". Click on the slide button for "turn on high contrast". Click on the "choose a theme" box to see the pull-down menu. Choose either "high contrast #1" or "high contrast #2", and then close the window. The themes will put borders around the icons on your taskbar, which is a little annoying, and you'll need to reset your desktop wallpaper, but it also puts turns the Firefox scrollbars black and puts a white border around the slider, making it easy to see. However, it also affects the web page colors. To correct that, open the Firefox options by clicking on the three horizontal line icon in the upper right corner of the browser window and selecting it. Find "fonts and colors" on the General page and click on "colors". Find the pull-down menu box for "override the colors specified..." and select "never" from the menu. Close the options pages. That should give you normal colors on your web pages with black high contrast scrollbars.