Another long weekend

I’m telling you, sometimes I wonder why I do all of this.  I get frustrated and just want to quit.  However I remind myself that I am not a quitter and little stumbling blocks can not and should not take me down!!

It all started late last week when I woke up and found our sites were down.  So I had our server rebooted and then everything was fine, well sort of.  I didn’t realize it until later that afternoon that something was wrong with my Burrows Solutions site.  So I called again and then had to submit a support ticket.  Friday morning I hadn’t heard anything so I was wondering what was going on?  Well I found that I had submitted a support question to myself, I’m so silly sometimes!!  So I submitted a real one and the fun began.  In the process of trying to fix the store our new support forum and chat feature became screwed up.  Luckily the support staff at IPB kicks ass, the forum was fixed in 50 minutes.  Finally in the end my full site backup ended up finally working!!  So instead of moving from Zen Cart to Mangeto (or something else) I finally ended up fixing the site.  Technology really drives me nuts sometimes.  I do not know everything but luckily I keep backups and most problems really aren’t that hard to fix.  It’s so silly to get so mad and worked up when one problem happens after 8 months of little or no problems.  I was so frustrated I just wanted to say to hell with it and move away from Zen Cart.  That would have taken away all my customizations and I would have spent many hours setting up a new store.  I am so glad right now that the backups finally worked.  I really hope everyone else had a better weekend that I!!

I hate support forums

This coming from a guy that runs two of them!  I honestly do not hate them but they can be quite aggravating!!  I had the inspiration for this post about 2 weeks ago but I’ve been busy so I kept putting it off.  I’ve also been wanting to start our new forum for at least the last year.  Plans and ideas have evolved so now is about the right time to launch it.

I was attempting to research a problem I had never encountered before by searching with our good buddy Google.  Of course I found several support forum posts and like usual they were useless.  I love all the smart ass and lazy “reinstall Windows” comments.  Why are so many forums littered with that worthless suggestion?  I have no problem admitting that I do not always have the time to find the cause for every problem, customers want their computer now and my boss doesn’t want to pay me for 6 hours on one problem.  It is just frustrating to have to dig through several different forums and pages of posts to finally find the right answer.  Sure sometimes the problem can be caused by a few different things also so one fix may help one person but not help the other.

So now onto the Burrows Solutions Support forum!  Ok my plan really isn’t to have the perfect or best forum, I really do not think that is possible.  I just hope to create a new community to continue helping computer users.  Since my development team and I have several different projects, future projects, and ideas we thought it would be a good idea to start a new forum.  A place to support all projects and try to help with other problems.  I really hope that I will be able to find the time to help more people with information that I find.  Basically like my example above, I would like to try and condense the information I find about a problem.  Tell you what fixed the problem for me and give you other fixes that might work.  Then hopefully you will find the time to reply and let us know what fixed the problem for you.  I truly hope that you will find the information helpful and that you will find the time to help out also.

So please head on over to our new Burrows Solutions Support forum and check it out.  It is currently the home of our UBUSB tool and will be the future home for UBDVD and UBDVD4Win7.  We have a nice chat feature over there also and hope that will help us better support more people when we have free time to chat.  It does currently have some limitations but we can pay for the ability to allow more people to chat at once.  I hope you understand when I say that I would rather wait and see if paying for it is necessary.  I would just hate to spend the money on something that is never used.  So I really hope that people use it and complain that they can not chat because they aren’t allowed to.  Once I see a lot of traffic in there, receive a few “complaints”, and have some extra cash I will pay the additional fee.

UBUSB, what is it?

I think that very few of our users know and/or pay much attention to what we include in UBCD4Win?  I will admit that part of this is my fault because I honestly do not always have the time to put up all the proper documentation on our website.  UBUSB.exe has been included in UBCD4Win for at least a year now and has been actively developed in our support forum.  I will say that Tom has done an excellent job with the tool and it works pretty well.  However because of the lack of me being able to update the UBCD4Win site in a timely manner and sometimes not having all the information I need for it I think very few people have really used UBUSB.  Very few of our users utilize our support forum anyways.

So I am happy and proud to help Tom announce the latest build of UBUSB!  It is still technically a beta but we need your help testing it more and making sure it is stable.  A really cool and nice compatibility that he has been able to work into it is that it will work with Windows 7 to a certain degree.  It does not have full Win7 support, but the tool will run and create your bootable USB drive while you are in the “XP Compatibility mode.”  All you have to do is attach it to the VM and it will work.  He does promise better support for Vista and Win7 but only in 32bit versions.  We need to do more testing with that.

If you are interested in having a bootable USB version of UBCD4Win, I highly suggest you check out the post in our forum here:
http://ubcd4win.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=11375&view=findpost&p=79840
In that announcement you will find some information, instructions, and download links for the tool. Please test it out and let us know what you think and if you happen to run into any problems.

Buy from a local shop!

I am always looking at new ideas for the business.  I see what the competition is doing and keep an eye on their prices.  These “big store” guys like Best Buy and Staples drive me nuts.  I’m sure some of them provide good services but from what I’ve heard and read most of them do not.  The arrogant college guys/gals that you deal with are enough to make you suicidal.  They do not offer advice, they are only trying to up sell.  Most of the time they don’t even know what they are doing, they are as bad as overseas support that reads from a script.  Now I can’t say that all small shops are good.  I know there are a few local guys and shops that only care about money and won’t be honest with customers and provide good advice.

I was looking through a Staples ad a couple of weeks ago and something caught my eye.  I really wish I would have gotten a screen shot or a copy of the paper ad but I forgot.  I was also hoping that the “offer” would be advertised for a few weeks.  They offered 3 different services for new computer purchases.  The middle option, “Uninstall unwanted programs and icons” is what caught my attention.  You have to pay Staples $99 to remove craplets??  Well at least they also install up to two programs for you also.  Now how about I buy a computer from a local shop?  Their price is probably going to be roughly $99 more than at Dell.com or from Staples, but at least it shouldn’t come with craplets!  Well unless you are lazy and just sell Dell computers like a local shop does.  I guess it is too much work to piece together quality parts and build a good system for your customers??
I have to give Staples a little credit here though, at least they realize that the computers they sell are not really ideal. However I don’t think that 10 minutes of uninstalling items from Control Panel is worth $99!  It is nice to see Staples trying to help us little guys out a little with these services.  If customers actually pay attention (which they usually don’t) to the big picture rather than being cheap, they would buy their systems from us little guys!!

Where is the Super AntiSpyware love??

We are all entitled to our opinions.  I swear by Kaspersky and we sell it at the shop I work at, while others like Eset, AVG, and others.

One trend that bothers me a little is how opinions shift.  We maybe that is not the right way to word it but my brain is a little frozen still from shoveling myself out of my driveway.  We finally had a decent snow storm yesterday and I had to fire up the snow blower at work!!  Fun stuff.  Years ago the big names were AdAware and Spy Bot.  They both did a pretty good job and still continue to do so to a degree.  A few years ago Super AntiSpyware appeared and everyone fell in love with it.  It was recommended everywhere!!  Then Malware Bytes AntiMalware came out and it has turned into the AdAware/Spy Bot battle.  Who is better?  I honestly do not know.  I use both at work and it is just like the old days, one finds stuff the other doesn’t find and vice versa.  I have personally dealt with both companies and quite honestly have to side with Super AntiSpyware.  The people at MBAM are very rude and cocky.  Dealing with SAS is much better and their people seem to actually care a little.  Now I will mention that I do sell SAS on my Burrows Solutions website and at work, so you could think I am bias.  I really do not feel that I am.  Like I mentioned, I’ve dealt with both and SAS is just more pleasant to deal with.  Both software titles will have their ups and downs, catch something new before the other does, and so on.  My backing though is with SAS.

So where is the SAS love at??  Why is everyone only recommending MBAM anymore?  I think it is really important to at least use both of them but I trust my real-time scanning to SAS.  What is your opinion?

HP “Black Screen Of Death” fixed??

Quickly I want to thank everyone for their comments on my bench fee post.  We heard from a lot of Techs out there and I really appreciate it.  However I’d really love to hear from end users and/or customers.  I understand though that most of those types of people probably do not read my blog.  Either way there is a lot of great information there and I appreciate it.

Onto the subject at hand.  I don’t know if all of you have heard of the HP “Black Screen Of Death” but it is a big problem with certain models of their laptops.  I’ve seen several of them in the past and I really hadn’t thought about repairing them until recently.  Like always YOU readers and users always inspire me into attempting new repairs.  I was contacted by a troubled user about a month ago asking if I could take care of the repair for him.  I researched it, cautioned the customer on the risk and he agreed to give it a try.  I researched it more, purchased some information on the fix, and bought a heat gun for the repair.  Some time was wasted with the heat gun though.  Instead of focusing on the repair we had to play with it and test it’s power!!  It is pretty cool!  I’ve thought of maybe posting some video of me catching items on fire with it but I’ve tried to focus on more work rather than play.  I am happy to report that the fix was successful!  I’m pretty excited about it and glad to see that I could possibly have another repair to offer to all of you.  I wish that I had more laptops that need this repair so I can really get an idea of what kind of success rate to expect with this repair.  I’m also concerned with how long this fix will work.  I’m confident in my abilities but there are always unknown variables and just basically do not want to charge $80 for a fix that only lasts a month or two.  I really do not think that will be the case but time will tell.

So I now offer a new repair service to you!  While this repair does not require any parts it is a more tedious and time consuming repair.  I think a fair price would probably be the same as my DC jack replacement.  I’m going to set it up the same as the DC jack repair, you pay the $30 for me to look at it and attempt the repair and then if/when I fix it you send $50.  Or you can pay the whole fee at my Burrows Solutions website and if I am not able to fix it I will refund you $50.  I do not have any special buy now buttons setup yet so just use the dc jack repair buttons for now if you are interested.  If you have any questions or concerns, please post a comment or email me.

Dry spell……Bench fees?

As most of you can tell I’m really not that great at this blog stuff.  I think I provide good information on occasion and occasionally make you laugh, as long as I believe that I will continue on!!  Some of you are just here for UBCD4Win news also, hopefully something will be reported on that soon.  Right now though I am in a bit of a dry spell.  There is no good news floating around and nothing really good to talk about.  Sure I could follow the herd and post some BS about the crappy new Ipad, nope not gonna do it.  In my thinking though I did remember something that I wanted to talk about……….

Bench fees.  What are your honest thoughts and opinions on them?  The shop that I work at does not charge one but I am teetering on the edge of thinking we need one?  There are some things out there that bother me such as extended warranties but this is different.  I am really curious to know what real people and techs think about charging a bench fee.  The thing that drives me nuts is when a customer says “Well, I’ll just order a Dell.”  Sure give them credit for being honest but most of the time they don’t even give us a chance to compete.  They just want us to confirm what is the matter for free.

So what do you all think?  I know some shops charge as much as a $49 bench fee.  I think a $19 fee would be more reasonable or it may be too low.  Do you think bench fees are fair and do they hurt your business?