PC Support
Call when something is wrong. That is the whole arrangement.
No contract, no monthly fee, no signing up for anything. One computer or a small office, a business or a household — the work is the same and so is the answer.
Nobody has to become a client
Plenty of people need a computer looked at twice a year and nothing else. That is a perfectly sensible way to live and it does not require a relationship, a plan, or an account number.
So this is the simple version. You describe what is happening, I tell you what I think it is and what it will cost to find out, and then you decide. If it turns out to be ten minutes, you are charged for ten minutes.
What people actually call about
It has got slow
Far and away the most common call, and almost never a dying computer. It is usually one of three or four ordinary causes, and a good number of them cost nothing at all to put right. See below, because this one deserves its own paragraph.
A new machine, and everything on the old one
The part people dread, and reasonably so. Files, mail, bookmarks, the printer, the password nobody has needed to type since 2021 because the old computer remembered it. The old machine stays untouched until the new one is proven, which is the only sane way to do this.
Something alarming on the screen
A warning, a phone number to call, a message saying you have been locked out. Sometimes it is real and sometimes it is theater, and telling the difference from a description over the phone is most of the job. Call before you call the number on the screen, not afterwards.
The printer, the wifi, the thing that used to work
Nothing changed and yet something changed. Usually an update, a router that quietly restarted, or a setting somebody adjusted six weeks ago for an unrelated reason. Unglamorous, frequently quick, and genuinely maddening to live with.
Your computer is probably not dying
A slow computer feels like a failing one. It almost never is. A machine that takes four minutes to open its mail is generally suffering from a full disk, a mechanical drive doing a job that mechanical drives stopped being good at years ago, or a pile of software that loads itself at startup and was never asked to.
Those are cheap problems. A solid state drive and a little more memory will frequently make a seven-year-old machine faster than it was when it was new, for a fraction of what a replacement costs, and the work takes an afternoon.
I am aware that saying so costs me the larger job. Age has never on its own been a reason to spend money, and I would rather tell you that your computer has four good years left in it than sell you one that does the same work.
Where I will say the opposite: when a machine no longer receives security updates. That is the one case where old has stopped meaning old and started meaning exposed, and then I will tell you plainly that it is time.
If somebody contacted you about your computer
Worth writing down plainly, because this is the one that costs people real money and it is built to make sensible adults feel foolish.
Microsoft does not call you. Neither does Apple, your bank, or the government. No legitimate company notices a problem on your machine and telephones you about it, and none of them will ever ask you to install something so they can look. A phone number in a pop-up is part of the pop-up. It is not a rescue line, it is the trap.
If you are on the phone with somebody right now, hang up. Hanging up on a stranger is not rude. It is the correct response, and nothing bad happens when you do it.
And if you have already let somebody in, call me and say so. There is no lecture at this end. It happens to careful people constantly, it works precisely because it is convincing, and what matters is what gets done in the next hour rather than how it started.
The number is (719) 900-1275. If something on your screen is frightening you right now, that is the one to call — not the one in the message.
And if they keep calling, hand them to me. They usually do keep calling — a number that answered once gets passed along and sold on, and people end up dreading their own telephone in their own house. So my clients give them my number, or simply pass me the phone.
I have had a great many of these conversations. I know what they are going to say, roughly when they are going to say it, and which questions end the call. It generally takes one, and then your number stops being worth their trouble. I cannot promise that every time, but it is how it usually goes.
You should not have to be the one handling this. It is not a skill anybody ought to need.
How it works
A good deal of this can be done remotely, which is faster for you and cheaper than a visit. Some of it genuinely cannot — anything involving a cable, a drive, or a machine that will not start needs somebody in the room, and for that I come to you.
You will know what it costs before I begin, and if partway through it turns into something larger, you will hear about that before it happens rather than on the invoice.
If it turns out the honest answer is that the repair costs more than the machine is worth, I will say so, and I will tell you what I would buy instead without selling it to you.
Describe what it is doing
You do not need the right words for it. “It makes a noise and then nothing happens” is a perfectly good description and I have solved a great many problems that started exactly there.