On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Wayne Johnson wrote:
Unfortunately there are too many shops out there that start with the
restore disk for the simplest little problem.
Which is not what I'm advocating.
FWIW I understand there are nasties out there than can go undetected but
nothing can change the fact that I've only had to do a complete
re-install on 2 machines in the last 10yrs. Sure there may have been
some machines that I spent too much time on but I would rather error on
the side of caution.
So who eats that time? You? Or the customer?
When you do a backup do you do a complete backup & if not what about all
the various configuration files then there is the time to get everything
restored?
The restore isn't bad. Prior to the reinstall you explain whats going on
to the customer. Find out what data they need, what programs they use
(You can have a list of the programs installed on the machine to jog their
memory) and backup from there.
Personally I just do the safe method on backups, I have an easy way of
making ghost backups, so I just ghost the drive to a spare I have on the
bench for the process, then I can be sure I won't miss any data, because
I'm not losing any data. And as for settings, if I need I can boot up and
find out what they were.
Sure there are times when doing a reinstall is the best thing for the
shop but IMO there is less than 5% of the time it's the best thing for
the client. This is one of those topics where many of us will have to
agree to disagree, eg: I like Fords & you like Chevys.
Actually, I like Fords too.
"Can the customer go out and buy a better machine than this one for the same
price it is going to cost for me to do the repair?"
That is why I never charge more than $200 for my time on a single machine
because the client can buy Chuck's favorite eMachine.
$200 is 2.5 hours of work. How long does it take to clean the machine,
verify the data, install all the windows updates, update the drivers,
check capacitors, run memtest and other repair tools, etc?
Christopher Fisk
--
I don't want to look like a weirdo. I'll just go with a muumuu.
-- Homer Simpson, King-Size Homer
