Unlike doctors, lawyers, accountants, HVAC companies and pretty much any other reputable industry, computer repair is not regulated by anyone so there is a wide range of quality between one computer repair guy and the next.

Let’s talk about those three types.

Computer Repair Tech 1: The “Quickie” Techs

First there are what I would call the “quickie” techs. These are usually (but not always) the computer repair services you find inside large stores. In many cases these are salespeople who have been trained to perform a handful of rudimentary technical tasks, including “wiping” a machine (removing all software, including the operating system) and reloading it from scratch. Hopefully if they are doing things correctly they remember to back up your data before they do this, but we do hear horror stories way too often from when they skip this step and critical files, photos, and data is lost forever.

The truth is that there is some merit in the “quickie” approach to computer repair. It’s easy – you don’t need an expensive, highly experienced technician to do it, so in theory your costs should be lower (though judging by what most big stores charge for computer repair you would not think this was the case). It’s also predictable – the outcome is the same every time. This is the one method that is pretty much guaranteed to solve all virus, spyware, data corruption, and other software-based issues. The downside is that someone (often the customer) must reinstall all their applications again, hope their data was backed up properly, and generally spend way too much time trying to get things back to the way they were before the repair. But being easy and predictable you can understand why many large department stores choose to go this way.

Computer Repair Tech 2: The “Stumblers”

The second type are what I will call the “stumblers”. These are the computer repair technicians who have some IT experience, but not as much as they should if they’re going to market themselves as a professional computer service. There is a big market out there for Stumblers because the truth is that about half of what we do is relatively easy and often the same: run a virus scan, remove what you find, reboot, test, move on. Stumblers are like advanced computer users really, they know some parts of the computer inside and out but usually have some gaps in their knowledge – like maybe they’re great with software, not so good with hardware, or maybe they understand networks just fine but aren’t very comfortable with servers.

I call them Stumblers because they can generally stumble through most computer repair situations and get a satisfactory result – eventually. It may take them 8 hours of work to accomplish what could be done in 2, or they may wind up with a really complicated work-around because they didn’t really understand something the server is doing. Stumblers are also likely to suffer from what we call “Nice Guy Syndrome” – that’s when they spend 2 days working on a solution then only charge you for 2 hours, because they know they should have known how to fix it faster.

Computer Repair Tech 3: The Professionals

The third category is a rare breed we call the Professionals. As you might expect, this is the category of computer repair services which Computer Troubleshooters fits into, as well as a relatively small group of other providers. How can you tell if you have a Professional Computer Repair partner? Here are some easy clues:
• Professionals show up when they promise
• Professionals fix the problem right the first time, most of the time
• Professionals recognise that no one knows everything about technology, so they work with a team of IT specialists so that every possible situation is handled as optimally as possible.
• Professionals don’t just fix problems, they suggest new ways to use technology to improve your business. In other words, a Professional moves beyond computer repair and into being a true IT Department for your business.
• Professionals take proactive steps to keep other problems from occurring. Today this often means using a low-cost monitoring service, similar to what you’d have monitoring your home security system, to watch for signs of impending computer repair issues. Overheating, hard drive errors, virus infections, security updates missing… these are things that any Professional computer repair partner should be able to monitor for on a low-cost managed services plan (like our BEST Lite plans), to keep big problems from happening in the first place.

So, which are you using? If your business isn’t using a Professional computer repair partner, then you need to change TODAY. In today’s competitive business environment you need all the help you can get.

And if you ARE a Professional, then we want you on OUR team. Computer Troubleshooters is expanding, across Ireland and around the world.