6 ms·

I don't know if this is location-specific, but I miss the times when PC technicians would actually try and diagnose problems. Whenever a family member sends th

I don't know if this is location-specific, but I miss the times when PC technicians would actually try and diagnose problems. Whenever a family member sends their PC to a "repair shop" (usually because "it was too slow") they get back a freshly-reinstalled PC and most of their files dumped inside a folder called "Backup". It then falls to me to reinstall all of their software while praying that their tax software has a "restore from copy" function or, failing that, at least a clearly-marked "database.db" file that I can overwrite.

exe34 2y ago
It's possible, but it'll cost you a lot more. It's cheaper to make backups and learn to restore from them, because your software is going to crash anyway, and your disk will die and take your most recent copy with it. Backups are your friends. My friend recently had his 3090 die, and somebody was able to diagnose the problem and replace the dead components - but it cost something like £100. That makes sense for an item he bought for £600, but if it cost £10 for something, it makes more sense to replace it.
- slipheen 2y ago
  I would like that sort of service but often am unable to find it. Do you have any suggestions? Perhaps you just have particularly good local shops?
  - exe34 2y ago
    I'll have to ask my friend, he sent his GPU to Wales for the repair. Personally I'll happily spend a week fixing something purely out of spite, against all economic incentives, but I wouldn't want to do it for a job. I have in the past replaced a friend's SSD and recovered his data from the older one that he somehow reformatted by accident. But it's a lot of effort.
  - ChoGGi 2y ago
    North West repair on YouTube is one. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SdymB1vLdF8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SdymB1vLdF8
- RetroTechie 2y ago
  > It's cheaper to make backups and learn to restore from them, because your software is going to crash anyway, and your disk will die and take your most recent copy with it. Just wondering what you'd get, if you take the above to an extreme? A tiny, immutable OS core? Low-level libs/drivers cached from a network, 'installed' on-the-fly / loaded as needed upon reboot? Apps loaded & run from their distribution archives, without intermediate install step? Sounds not too different from how computing was done in early days (apart from 'cache drivers from a network'). Makes one think what this "install software" nonsense is about, really.
  - Tijdreiziger 2y ago
    That’s basically containerization, right?
  - rlupi 2y ago
    > Just wondering what you'd get, if you take the above to an extreme? ChromeOS
    - exe34 2y ago
      ChromeOS and SaaS
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > Just wondering what you'd get, if you take the above to an extreme? You might get some shade of nixos: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/ https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/ (Frankly, default nixos already does a bit of the whole "apps aren't installed per se" thing - `nix shell nixpkgs#foo` gives you a shell with foo "installed" but only until you exit the shell and run garbage collection.)
criley2 2y ago
This isn't a new phenomenon. In the mid 2000s I was working in a computer repair shop and similarly most of our fixes were just windows reinstalls with some light backup. Why? Because that fixed basically every software problem and was mostly unattended work so it didn't cost a lot. Ultimately the customer wants the cheapest and fastest solution. They don't care that it was their limewire viruses or bonzai buddy IE extensions or whatever that slowed it down. Here's the big kicker imo: If we were charging $100 for a reinstall/backup, and we could sell them a faster computer for $400, then there is very little wiggle room for real repair to happen. Parts + labor could easily exceed the cost of a new budget machine. If there isn't a RMA (free part replacement) involved, the repair probably wasn't worth it. It's just the economics of computer repair, imo.
- b112 2y ago
  Yes. In the early 90s I did board level repairs on Amigas, the most fun was rewiring a board after someone spilt spaghetti sauce inside and just kept using it. Then ants got inside. It was like some sort of miniature world horror movie, mould, eaten traces, ants in dead poses from shorts. Did a bathtub soap off and dry in oven, used alcohol to second wash, replaced like 4473838 billion caps, and had to rewire a few traces. Good times, and still cheaper than a replacement board. (The soap ph was particularly important due to all the acidic leaking caps) But that was computing costs in the early 90s.
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    What kind of monsters spills spaghetti sauce and then keeps using it?!? Powerful.
    - b112 2y ago
      http://amigablogs.net/feed/2016/10/upgrading-amiga-1200-part-1 http://amigablogs.net/feed/2016/10/upgrading-amiga-1200-part... They spilled it all in the top vents, and didn't open it to clean. It oozed everywhere inside. They only cleaned the outside. The guy told me "it smelled really bad for a while, then seemed fine, until the ants came"
ranger207 2y ago
I did tech support at different times for both retail customers and coworkers. For people's personal computers I'd make every effort to fix it as it was, and was usually pretty successful. Occasionally there'd be a virus too deep or the thing would be loaded up with so much bloat from the factory that a reinstall was easier, but I'd try to put files back in place and reinstall as many programs as I could. When I was working company IT I'd just wipe and reimage. All their stuff was in OneDrive or Sharepoint, and 90% of the apps were in SCCM. That way I didn't have to worry about missing a problem or weird issues relating to updating instead of installing from scratch, and it was faster so they'd get back to work sooner anyway
- whatevaa 2y ago
  Unless you are a software developer, then 90% of apps isn't in SCCM crapware and you don't put repos/ssh keys and other stuff in onedrive/sharepoint, and then setup after reimage takes half a day.
genewitch 2y ago
during my short stint at a PC repair place the owner changed policies from "attempt to remove viruses" to "reformat/reinstall if more than 5 viruses reported". Shortly after, a customer came in with an urgent need to get their PC fixed, it had more than 5 viruses (maybe 20? who knows). I didn't reimage, because in SATA HDD days that would take quite a while. I booted the antivirus/repair CDROM that me and a coworker made, removed the viruses, rebooted into windows and let it do a scan too. The job was to remove the viruses, not find the underlying cause. Boss was out of the office thursday and friday, so we just did what the customer asked. well this customer, who begged us to get this done, had some website or plugin or lord knows what that reinfected them, and they brought it back the following Monday and complained. I got fired for not following policy. Nevermind that reimaging wouldn't have fixed the stupid of this customer, they still would have brought it in on monday, but "we reformatted the drive" would have sufficed as "we did the work, you messed it up, pay us again." ETA: we had a whiteboard with a "record virus count" and it was between 30 and 40 thousand infected files found when i left. I can understand reimaging with 30,000 infected files (at the time a default windows install was only about twice that number of files if memory serves, win11 has 134K files in c:\windows), but 20?
- unaindz 2y ago
  Although I find firing you for that silly and not a smart move from your boss the policy seems necessary after a few years in IT. We don't even have a minimum amount of virus, if we or the client suspect there is, no matter what an anti virus program says, we format the computer. It's easier, faster and infallible, not like antivirus that take more time than a fresh install to run and can miss viruses.
unaindz 2y ago
As shitty as it is it's just capitalism. Clients want something fixed while paying as little as possible. Meanwhile the stack of things that can go wrong grows to hardware malfuctions, firmware, os and app bugs plus issues that arise from between the chair and the monitor. Finding the root cause, not always, but often enough takes time and time is money. Often not even the client cares about the root cause and less so if that means you are billing him all the hours.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
Isn't the problem that you need a very high qualified person for some issues? If you survived messing with a virus, you could get a Windows evangelist to help you fix the mess, but that would be very expensive. Noticing that you can replace the database.db usually requires some software engineering knowledge (understanding / guessing how things work). I had a couple of issues regarding my desktop PC turning itself on. I diagnosed ethernet, windows, bios. Recently that PC died, so it must have been a hardware issue (I have yet to diagnose which part broke, sadly I suspect the motherboard), but the electrical issue could have been caused by that part. I had a bunch of weird problems over the years that would have been really weird to diagnose.

exe34 2y ago

It's possible, but it'll cost you a lot more. It's cheaper to make backups and learn to restore from them, because your software is going to crash anyway, and your disk will die and take your most recent copy with it. Backups are your friends. My friend recently had his 3090 die, and somebody was able to diagnose the problem and replace the dead components - but it cost something like £100. That makes sense for an item he bought for £600, but if it cost £10 for something, it makes more sense to replace it.

slipheen 2y ago
I would like that sort of service but often am unable to find it. Do you have any suggestions? Perhaps you just have particularly good local shops?
- exe34 2y ago
  I'll have to ask my friend, he sent his GPU to Wales for the repair. Personally I'll happily spend a week fixing something purely out of spite, against all economic incentives, but I wouldn't want to do it for a job. I have in the past replaced a friend's SSD and recovered his data from the older one that he somehow reformatted by accident. But it's a lot of effort.
- ChoGGi 2y ago
  North West repair on YouTube is one. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SdymB1vLdF8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SdymB1vLdF8
RetroTechie 2y ago
> It's cheaper to make backups and learn to restore from them, because your software is going to crash anyway, and your disk will die and take your most recent copy with it. Just wondering what you'd get, if you take the above to an extreme? A tiny, immutable OS core? Low-level libs/drivers cached from a network, 'installed' on-the-fly / loaded as needed upon reboot? Apps loaded & run from their distribution archives, without intermediate install step? Sounds not too different from how computing was done in early days (apart from 'cache drivers from a network'). Makes one think what this "install software" nonsense is about, really.
- Tijdreiziger 2y ago
  That’s basically containerization, right?
- rlupi 2y ago
  > Just wondering what you'd get, if you take the above to an extreme? ChromeOS
  - exe34 2y ago
    ChromeOS and SaaS
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Just wondering what you'd get, if you take the above to an extreme? You might get some shade of nixos: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/ https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/ (Frankly, default nixos already does a bit of the whole "apps aren't installed per se" thing - `nix shell nixpkgs#foo` gives you a shell with foo "installed" but only until you exit the shell and run garbage collection.)

criley2 2y ago

This isn't a new phenomenon. In the mid 2000s I was working in a computer repair shop and similarly most of our fixes were just windows reinstalls with some light backup. Why? Because that fixed basically every software problem and was mostly unattended work so it didn't cost a lot. Ultimately the customer wants the cheapest and fastest solution. They don't care that it was their limewire viruses or bonzai buddy IE extensions or whatever that slowed it down. Here's the big kicker imo: If we were charging $100 for a reinstall/backup, and we could sell them a faster computer for $400, then there is very little wiggle room for real repair to happen. Parts + labor could easily exceed the cost of a new budget machine. If there isn't a RMA (free part replacement) involved, the repair probably wasn't worth it. It's just the economics of computer repair, imo.

b112 2y ago
Yes. In the early 90s I did board level repairs on Amigas, the most fun was rewiring a board after someone spilt spaghetti sauce inside and just kept using it. Then ants got inside. It was like some sort of miniature world horror movie, mould, eaten traces, ants in dead poses from shorts. Did a bathtub soap off and dry in oven, used alcohol to second wash, replaced like 4473838 billion caps, and had to rewire a few traces. Good times, and still cheaper than a replacement board. (The soap ph was particularly important due to all the acidic leaking caps) But that was computing costs in the early 90s.
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  What kind of monsters spills spaghetti sauce and then keeps using it?!? Powerful.
  - b112 2y ago
    http://amigablogs.net/feed/2016/10/upgrading-amiga-1200-part-1 http://amigablogs.net/feed/2016/10/upgrading-amiga-1200-part... They spilled it all in the top vents, and didn't open it to clean. It oozed everywhere inside. They only cleaned the outside. The guy told me "it smelled really bad for a while, then seemed fine, until the ants came"

ranger207 2y ago

I did tech support at different times for both retail customers and coworkers. For people's personal computers I'd make every effort to fix it as it was, and was usually pretty successful. Occasionally there'd be a virus too deep or the thing would be loaded up with so much bloat from the factory that a reinstall was easier, but I'd try to put files back in place and reinstall as many programs as I could. When I was working company IT I'd just wipe and reimage. All their stuff was in OneDrive or Sharepoint, and 90% of the apps were in SCCM. That way I didn't have to worry about missing a problem or weird issues relating to updating instead of installing from scratch, and it was faster so they'd get back to work sooner anyway

whatevaa 2y ago
Unless you are a software developer, then 90% of apps isn't in SCCM crapware and you don't put repos/ssh keys and other stuff in onedrive/sharepoint, and then setup after reimage takes half a day.

genewitch 2y ago

during my short stint at a PC repair place the owner changed policies from "attempt to remove viruses" to "reformat/reinstall if more than 5 viruses reported". Shortly after, a customer came in with an urgent need to get their PC fixed, it had more than 5 viruses (maybe 20? who knows). I didn't reimage, because in SATA HDD days that would take quite a while. I booted the antivirus/repair CDROM that me and a coworker made, removed the viruses, rebooted into windows and let it do a scan too. The job was to remove the viruses, not find the underlying cause. Boss was out of the office thursday and friday, so we just did what the customer asked. well this customer, who begged us to get this done, had some website or plugin or lord knows what that reinfected them, and they brought it back the following Monday and complained. I got fired for not following policy. Nevermind that reimaging wouldn't have fixed the stupid of this customer, they still would have brought it in on monday, but "we reformatted the drive" would have sufficed as "we did the work, you messed it up, pay us again." ETA: we had a whiteboard with a "record virus count" and it was between 30 and 40 thousand infected files found when i left. I can understand reimaging with 30,000 infected files (at the time a default windows install was only about twice that number of files if memory serves, win11 has 134K files in c:\windows), but 20?

unaindz 2y ago
Although I find firing you for that silly and not a smart move from your boss the policy seems necessary after a few years in IT. We don't even have a minimum amount of virus, if we or the client suspect there is, no matter what an anti virus program says, we format the computer. It's easier, faster and infallible, not like antivirus that take more time than a fresh install to run and can miss viruses.

unaindz 2y ago

As shitty as it is it's just capitalism. Clients want something fixed while paying as little as possible. Meanwhile the stack of things that can go wrong grows to hardware malfuctions, firmware, os and app bugs plus issues that arise from between the chair and the monitor. Finding the root cause, not always, but often enough takes time and time is money. Often not even the client cares about the root cause and less so if that means you are billing him all the hours.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago

Isn't the problem that you need a very high qualified person for some issues? If you survived messing with a virus, you could get a Windows evangelist to help you fix the mess, but that would be very expensive. Noticing that you can replace the database.db usually requires some software engineering knowledge (understanding / guessing how things work). I had a couple of issues regarding my desktop PC turning itself on. I diagnosed ethernet, windows, bios. Recently that PC died, so it must have been a hardware issue (I have yet to diagnose which part broke, sadly I suspect the motherboard), but the electrical issue could have been caused by that part. I had a bunch of weird problems over the years that would have been really weird to diagnose.