Laptop Repair

[danrhodes]

Over the weekend I did 2 laptop repairs, a regular thing for me for private clients. I had a nice Tosh laptop, decent spec, only a few months old.

 

The guys son had filled it up with rubbish and spyware, I installed Windows 7 x32 and copied over all his work and music and pictures, clean and free of viruses.

 

I handed him back the laptop yesterday morning, only to come into work today and find that his son said it was amazing and really quick and that he was really happy but that now it was taking 20 minutes to load.

 

Turns out hes filled it back up with rubbish and now he wants me to fix it again, for free!

 

I got the "oh but cant you just do us a favour" no, I've fixed it once, you have broken it again, I charge again!

 

D

[adamchapman]

I thought about creating images for all private machines that I do... for that reason!!

[LeMarchand]

I thought about creating images for all private machines that I do... for that reason!!

 

Me too, but would that include their documents? If so, do you really want Gigs of someone else's dubious downloads and "adult" material stored on your property?

[danrhodes]

My thoughts exactly, I don't want to or can afford to be storing all their digital fluff! Im going to start partitioning part of their Hard Drive and use it to store a base image of their OS that way when it comes back I can just restore the image.

 

D

[Rydra]

Set a "Signup fee" for first incident with a machine, where you buy a new, specific hard drive for that client, or that specific machine. Keep a box stashed out of the way with all of them.

Use laptop hard drives, they are a fraction of the size!

[tech_guy]

I repartition the HDD with a hidden partition and store a copy of the image there. On today's drives, they never miss the 20GB or so I set aside for this purpose.

[LeMarchand]

Im going to start partitioning part of their Hard Drive and use it to store a base image of their OS that way when it comes back I can just restore the image.

 

Do you know a way to set up an "OEM" style recovery partition (eg press CTRL+whatever during boot, or add an extra boot option to start the restore process)? I know it's easy enough to use a boot CD, but I was thinking that if you had 3 partitions (Hidden Recovery, OS/Programs and documents) then it could be a "last resort" to offer customers that you can't get to.

[bossman]

I create a full build image with applications that they require and then store that. If they come to me for fixing they already know that I charge £40 for re-image so they pay, if they require restoration of their work/pictures, they pay extra, if they have paid for fixing more than 4 times in a year they soon stop the teenager from using or ask me to create restrictive accounts for them so they cannot install software and rubbish.

 

It took me years to gain the professional qualifications and lots of hard earned money so they pay accordingly as they would if their car needed repairing but probably a lot less.

[fafster]

I've used the hidden recovery partition a number of times. Now I just need to create a USB flash drive with Clonezilla on it to automate the recovery process.

[SYNACK]

Do you know a way to set up an "OEM" style recovery partition (eg press CTRL+whatever during boot, or add an extra boot option to start the restore process)? I know it's easy enough to use a boot CD, but I was thinking that if you had 3 partitions (Hidden Recovery, OS/Programs and documents) then it could be a "last resort" to offer customers that you can't get to.

 

Just use a slim copy of Windows PE (@200MB) with a batch file at bootup or a pretty HTA if you are feeling nice, make a WIM image of the done drive and store it as a partition with no drive letter then add this to the Windows boot menu. If they are still on XP it would need to use the Vista/7 boot sector/loader but this is transparent to the user and easy to implement also.

[Pete10141748]

Jeez, what the heck is his son doing with the laptop to take it from perfect working order to utter cr@p performance in only a few days?!?!?!

 

Asking for a 'free' re-repair is damn cheeky, far as I'm concerend. I mean, you wouldn't ask a supermarket for free shopping this week because you paid for it last week, would you!

[danrhodes]

Jeez, what the heck is his son doing with the laptop to take it from perfect working order to utter cr@p performance in only a few days?!?!?!

 

Asking for a 'free' re-repair is damn cheeky, far as I'm concerend. I mean, you wouldn't ask a supermarket for free shopping this week because you paid for it last week, would you!

 

Exactly, he had it less than 24 Hours, he downloaded a program called spotify, and some random program that ripps music from his ITouch, ever since the pc is like its running through treacle!

 

Free repairs are not an option when it comes back broken, if it had come back with something not right as a result of me not doing something correct then I would as anybody would, apologise and repair it free of change, but as he broke it, well im sorry, pay up!

 

D

[witch]

Must be the ITouch stuff - I have spotify on my (fairly old) laptop and it certainly doesnt slow it down that I have noticed.

[danrhodes]

Must be the ITouch stuff - I have spotify on my (fairly old) laptop and it certainly doesnt slow it down that I have noticed.

 

Yep, must be the ITouch program then, glad thats cleared up :-)

 

D