takaboku said:
Well folks, I never really got a chance to try any of your suggestion. I tried to boot into the "safe mode" and got "The Blue Screen of Death". I tried starting up with the XP recovery disk in, but it won't load up. I have the Geek Squad coming to the house next week... Will cost no more than $249 puke: If you have any more suggestion, please let me know. thanks!
I only charge $99 flat rate for first time customers!! Either you're a sucker or I'm charging too little! (plus my rates are in canadian dollars so it's even less!)
As for services like
Geek Squad,
Nerds on Site, ... you take your chances! I know this from working at a Dell call centre. Sometimes you get a good tech, sometimes a bad tech. If you're lucky, you could get an ace tech or if you're in God's bad books, you could get a zero tech. Large organizations are like that. There's a wide range of talent and you don't know which one is going to show up.
Case in point is a recent customer of mine. He has 3 comps networked in his home and wanted to have a shared printer. He tried Nerds but the tech couldn't do it, yet, he still had to pay the minimum $99 (higher if the tech could do it!) Then he tried a local comp store. The tech there convinced him to buy a printer server and charged him $120 to set it up. He couldn't do it either. Not only was the customer forced to pay that loser (I had a previous experience with that clown myself), he wouldn't allow the customer to return the wireless printer server! The customer liked my brochure because I have a guarantee that if I can't fix it, he doesn't have to pay. It took me 10 minutes and he could print from any comp over the network.
He's had me back twice to work on other things!
Here's a better example. Back when I worked at Dell, I sometimes did "callbacks". Some problems involved running a long scan or installing Windows, so we put that customer in a "callback" and went on to the next call. One tech agent was designated to do callbacks exclusively every shift. I did that a lot. It was doing this I witnessed firsthand the amazing difference in capabilities. Some agents were magicians, seemed to pick the right troubleshooting technique! I was like "WOW!!" Then you'd see some goof who told the customer to reformat/reinstall for a routine problem that had a known solution. I recall I had one coworker in my group that the manager was suscipious about because he average call handle time was unusually low, week after week. When I did callbacks I found out why. If he couldn't solve the problem in 10 minutes, he told the customer the R&R and threw it into the callback queue!! The worst were some techs who told customers to R&R when there's a factory image on the PC!!
You could try
Geek Squad and get an ace tech who'll have your system working in no time! Or you could get a zero and after 2 hours will tell you he/she can't do it and you need to reformat/reinstall. Or you get an OK tech. You don't know.
