A major office supply store has been promoting technical support services – often at a discount. All of their offerings are directed to PC or laptop owners, and the discounts only apply to a machine that you bring into the store.
Well, if you think you have a virus on your PC and are willing to get under the desk, unplug everything, schlep the PC to the store, and hand it over to a stranger, you are a very hardy and an incredibly self-sufficient individual. After all, once the work is done, you have to bring the PC back home, crawl down under the desk, and hook everything back up. All that effort was worth the money you saved with the discount, right?
But what happens when one of your frequently used programs stops behaving the way you expect it to? And what happens when you get an error message from your printer? Those things didn’t happen before you brought your PC to the store – they only happened after you brought it home.
So you call the store and complain, “Hey, this program doesn’t work right any more, and I can’t print anything because of this error message.” The likely response you will get form the store’s technical support representative is, “Bring the PC in, along with the printer and the cables, so that we can see what’s going on.” I am not certain how you are going to respond to that – if at all. But for the store, that’s easy, isn’t it?
Instead of trying to be so self-sufficient (just to save a few bucks), you should have contacted a reliable computer consultant so that you could have avoided the headaches associated with an incident like this. You should be looking for a company that offers an affordable service plan that makes sure your anti-virus software is always up-to-date, and that a system scan is run on a regular basis.
Most top-notch computer consulting firms can establish a remote session to determine exactly what actions to take to eradicate any malware on your PC. If you didn’t have access to the Internet, you should make certain the computer consultant is located nearby.
In either case, your problem would have been solved without your having to take everything apart and bring it to some other location. Now that’s what I consider easy tech support!