Example 1)
A lady came to me with a very slow laptop which was continuously locking up. Upon checking the laptop over I found a number of nasties including 4 viruses which had infected over 800 files. The hard drive in the machine was also experiencing lots of read/write errors so was clearly on its way out. On top of that, Windows was terribly out of date and unable to update itself because of the viruses.
The computer was taking well over 20 minutes just to load so my first job was to install a new super-fast SSD drive and migrate the system to it. I then removed the 4 viruses and cleaned all the infected files. After that, I updated the computer to the latest version of Windows 10 (22H2) and installed all the subsequent patches and security fixes. I noticed there were loads of browser extensions installed into Chrome and Firefox and most of them were rubbish so I removed them and performed a basic service.
After all the above work had been carried out, the laptop was able to load Windows in less than 15 seconds, was clear of viruses, was up to date and had a new, super-fast hard drive. I charged a total of £140 including the parts and gained a happy customer.
Example 2)
I was asked if I could help with some website and email problems. Their email wasn’t being received on their computer or iPad and they were unable to log onto the back end of their website to make changes. All this was resolved onsite and I charged £50. Another happy customer.
Example 3)
I was asked to help with an incredibly high specification iMac, the owner wanted it set back to factory settings but the process was not working. After dropping it off to me, I checked it over and found the recovery partition had been deleted. I reinstalled the recovery partition, then installed the latest version of Mac OS. I charged £75. Happy, happy, happy!
Example 4)
I was asked to visit a very large house that had a terrible Internet connection. Upon checking I found they were getting about 0.3mb/sec which is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY SLOW! The house had 6 phone sockets and all of them had ASDL filters installed between the socket and the phone. The master socket had already been upgraded so the filters were not only unnecessary, but also completely ruining their line quality. I removed the filters and their speed climbed to 36 mb/sec. Yay! It took me an hour and half and I charged £75. I visited a few days later and installed 4 wi-fi repeaters so their Internet worked perfectly all over their house. They bought the wi-fi repeaters so I just charged for my time which was another £100. The phrase the lady used was “Chuffed to buggery”. I’m not sure what that means but I’m guessing she was happy!
Example 5)
I was asked to look at a computer that absolutely refused to work on the Internet. They’d tried a number of computer experts before but no one could fix it. I tried all the normal things but none of them worked. I then used a network sniffer to examine the traffic that the computer was attempting to send and found my answer. The issue was fixed and the problem resolved. I charged £80 and gained another happy customer. Wohoo!