3 ms·

I worked as a repair tech for years, and I found that many performance problems could be fixed with that sysinternals startup tool (I forgot the name, it's been

by arp242 3y ago

I worked as a repair tech for years, and I found that many performance problems could be fixed with that sysinternals startup tool (I forgot the name, it's been a long time) and just disabling stuff. This would be 5 minutes if you knew what you were doing. The second was hardware issues, especially slow hard drives that started to fail but hadn't quite failed yet. There was a tool to read all data and print drops in performance (again, I forgot the name). This was before SSDs became commonplace – I don't know what it's like with SSDs. I was as productive as anyone in terms of number of customers helped/week, but looking at my coworkers there were definitely two types of techs: the ones like me who knew what they were doing, and the ones who didn't. I know this sounds rather arrogant and pompous, but it's true. As a company, you can give people the time and space to develop this know-how, or you can't, which is how you end up with "just reinstall shrug" type of repair shops. I was lucky enough to work at a small independent shop where we were given lots of free space and autonomy, and some of us took this to become pretty good at fixing stuff in short turnaround times, which benefited everyone. We developed a bunch of internal tooling for this, too. I maintained Anduril, our FreeBSD-based live disk with tons of stuff (the company name was Aragorn, so this seemed like a good name). Of course, this store no longer exists. Or rather, they pivoted to business support, because there's just no competing against the online stores with €10 profit margins on every laptop they sell, and there just aren't enough consumers to care about quality support to make the financials work out.

criley2 3y ago
I mean, we absolutely did "Free PC Checkups" and obviously we knew how to tinker with startup and do virus and adware removal. These aren't some magical skills that only the rarest of employees knew, it was absolutely basic nerd knowledge that everyone who even applied knew front and back. Back then of course adware/malware scanners were huge. We certainly did hook computers up and start a bevy of automated scanners and tools and fix performance issues. And every single time it cost a lot more labor and a lot more money to the customer. But it's up to them and a lot of people didn't want a reformat or had a more expensive computer that wasn't as economical to replace. Believe me when I tell you that productivity wise, a guy reformatting 5 computers at once in an hour flat is lapping anyone who is spending multiple hours per computer running those scanners and tinkering setting by setting.
- arp242 3y ago
  > Believe me when I tell you that productivity wise, a guy reformatting 5 computers at once in an hour flat is lapping anyone who is spending multiple hours per computer running those scanners and tinkering setting by setting. You don't need multiple hours; that's my point. Hardware check (which you need to do in any case) + autoruns were all you needed in most cases. I spent close to four years doing this as my full-time job. Our standard rate was €40 (a lot less than your $100 for a reinstall). We didn't go bankrupt.
JackGreyhat 3y ago
"Autoruns" is the sysinternals tool you're talking about ;)
- arp242 3y ago
  Ah yeah, that's the one. I don't know what the current situation is, but the amount of crapware back in the day was just staggering; every installer offered to "helpfully" install an extra toolbar or virus scanner or whatnot, which is how people ended up with 3 virus scanners and 8 toolbars in IE.

by arp242 3y ago

criley2 3y ago

I mean, we absolutely did "Free PC Checkups" and obviously we knew how to tinker with startup and do virus and adware removal. These aren't some magical skills that only the rarest of employees knew, it was absolutely basic nerd knowledge that everyone who even applied knew front and back. Back then of course adware/malware scanners were huge. We certainly did hook computers up and start a bevy of automated scanners and tools and fix performance issues. And every single time it cost a lot more labor and a lot more money to the customer. But it's up to them and a lot of people didn't want a reformat or had a more expensive computer that wasn't as economical to replace. Believe me when I tell you that productivity wise, a guy reformatting 5 computers at once in an hour flat is lapping anyone who is spending multiple hours per computer running those scanners and tinkering setting by setting.

arp242 3y ago
> Believe me when I tell you that productivity wise, a guy reformatting 5 computers at once in an hour flat is lapping anyone who is spending multiple hours per computer running those scanners and tinkering setting by setting. You don't need multiple hours; that's my point. Hardware check (which you need to do in any case) + autoruns were all you needed in most cases. I spent close to four years doing this as my full-time job. Our standard rate was €40 (a lot less than your $100 for a reinstall). We didn't go bankrupt.

JackGreyhat 3y ago

"Autoruns" is the sysinternals tool you're talking about ;)

arp242 3y ago
Ah yeah, that's the one. I don't know what the current situation is, but the amount of crapware back in the day was just staggering; every installer offered to "helpfully" install an extra toolbar or virus scanner or whatnot, which is how people ended up with 3 virus scanners and 8 toolbars in IE.