Month: March 2015

Pop Ups and Viruses

Posted on by

If your Internet Explorer or Firefox keeps popping up with ads and such then your computer is infected by something. The infection will eventually slow your computer down to a crawl and will become unusable. Worse than that is the infection may be spying on you and possibly even ‘key logging’ where ‘they’ are able to harvest your passwords, credit card numbers, etc.

Your computer needs cheering up and I can help. I never know how bad a computer is until I start work but I will not spend more than two hours of my time on cleaning up your computer. A full spyware and virus removal will cost between $80 and $160 but most of them can be removed within the first 60 minutes.

If the virus cannot be removed or the damage done to the operating system is too great then sometimes I have to back up all of your data, reformat the drive and re-install the operating system before putting your data back. I prefer to do this in my workshop since your computer has many hours of work to do.

Again, I will do all that I can to keep your costs down.

 

Solid State Hard Drives

Posted on by

I’ve had my laptop for about five years now and it’s served me well. In that time, I had never re-installed Windows and it was starting to show. A bit buggy and too many crashes.

Rather than backing up and wiping, I purchased a solid state hard drive and installed a fresh operating system. What a transformation! Windows 7 now boots up in seven seconds and the computer is soooo fast now.

SSHD’s aren’t real cheap yet but if you want  decent upgrade on speed then this can be a great way to go.

Backing Up

Posted on by

It’s really important that you back up your files as often as possible. In my years of fixing computers I have seen so many hard drives fail and it’s not always possible to recovery the data.

If you want to keep your back up in house, your data must be COPIED to another hard drive, not moved. The external hard drive is just as likely to fail as the hard drive in your computer so your data needs to be on at least two hard drives.

Better still you can upload your data to an online back up site – there are plenty of them to choose from.

Hard drives are not terribly expensive but your data is priceless. Get it backed up!

$50 re-install of Windows…

Posted on by

Do you have an old computer or laptop knocking around that doesn’t work? Maybe it was full of viruses and you bought a new computer?

As long as there’s no data for me to back up, I will format your hard drive and install a fresh operating system for $50.

If you do have old documents and pictures and stuff that you want to keep then it will be a little more expensive but you’d still get change from $100.

The only thing is I would have to do the work in my workshop as it takes half a day 🙂

Data Recovery

Posted on by

If you have lost important data, photo’s, documents, etc. on a computer, external hard drive, USB drive, CD or floppy then it is entirely possible that we can get it off for you.

If you bought a new computer and all of your documents and stuff is still on your old one then again we can help by grabbing the data and migrating it to the new one.

Copying data takes ages but, when it’s done in our workshop we are able to do other things while the data is being copied so don’t have to charge for every minute. That’s why we don’t like doing data recovery or migration on site.

Recovering data from a broken or damaged hard drive is much more specialised and can be extremely time consuming and hands on. This type of work will be quoted on an individual basis. Sending a drive away for data recovery can cost thousands of dollars but I can assure you that will not happen with us. We do not run up bills on customers.

Slow Computers

Posted on by

Are you thinking of upgrading because your computer really slow now? If it was fast enough for you when you first got it – it is not the hardware that’s the problem.

Your computer is just full of junk and has way too many processes and programs running in the background. It needs cheering up. You will be amazed how quick your computer is when it’s been cleaned up a bit.

Give us a call to make an appointment to give your computer a spring clean.