Tag: advice

Why you shouldn’t trust big box store clerks…

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

UPDATE: The TigerDirect store being referenced is under new management.  I have spoken with the management about this issue; he already took care of it.  Turns out their commissioning model before the new manager arrived was causing employees to reach return rates of 30%-40%, which is egregiously high, because they would up-sell too much garbage to make the commission.  He also fired half the staff there; the people that I have worked with recently have proven to be a delight.  The store in Durham, North Carolina is the one I was previously referencing, and I’d encourage anyone in the NC Triangle proper to visit there, because good management means a good business.  The salespeople know they make some kind of minimal commission on their sales, but they aren’t made privy to the details and so they don’t know what to “push,” meaning they just do their jobs right and they make more money–as it should be!

I received the following E-mail today, and it bothered me enough to bring about a nifty little anecdote about why clerks at major chains generally can’t be trusted.  Note that I frequently shop at TigerDirect and send clients there quite often as well (with a warning to be careful about the advice from the salespeople), but one can’t deny problematic business models, and this irked me enough to open my big fat mouth.

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Hey Jody.

Everything seems to be working well. I was able to return the CA software to Tiger Direct, but they gave me a big hassle.

The guy said CA is better than Avast. Is that true?

Thanks,

[CENSORED]

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My response (true story):

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A little hint…

I overheard some TigerDirect employees in the [CENSORED] store talking one night before they closed up.  They were discussing how successful each of them had been making sales that day, and they discussed it in terms of how many COMMISSIONED ITEMS they sold, along with some “best of” stories from their sales history as well.

Guess what they get commissions for selling?

You got it:

* CA products
* PC Pitstop Optimize
* WaCa extended warranty/service plans

All three of which I strongly discourage the purchase of.  If you know of Clark Howard (consumer advocate and personal finance radio host), you know how much he hates extended service plans, too.

I have literally hundreds (as in triple-digits, probably to the tune of at least 200) customers on Avast as their only virus protection.  Most of these customers have been repeat customers for at least one additional session, and it has served all of them well enough that I have had single-digit rejections of Avast long-term in favor of other products–usually because of the customer’s bias (I am thinking of one specific customer who MUST have Norton or bust, in fact) rather than the product itself.  It does better than Norton, and unlike Norton it does not do so at the expense of your machine’s performance and stability.

Yes, CA is better than Avast.

If you’re making a commission selling it.

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If a representative from TigerDirect corporate wishes, they may contact me and I will gladly explain and elaborate.  Having commissioned salespeople is a great way to chase off customers, primarily because when they discover that they’ve been played like a fiddle and up-sold one too many times, they don’t typically stick around.  In all honestly, I only send customers there because they have great prices.  If they want to go somewhere where the staff is much more knowledgeable and the salespeople are not commissioned, I send them over to Intrex instead.  (I don’t worry about either store taking away my service/repair clientele–I overhear pretty long turn-around estimates from their repair counters measured in weeks, whereas my business is measured in hours or days at the worst!)

While I’m poking at specific players in the computer field, I have to say what every other computer technician already seems to know:  Best Buy’s “Geek Squad” is the worst computer service provider in existence on all counts.  Extremely high prices, a plethora of customer complaints, duplicating customers’ private data for personal purposes, disastrous complaint handling (as seen in the hateful remarks of a certain “Agent Orange“), and if you don’t believe a word of it, check out the ten-page confession from a former employee that resulted in a lawsuit being filed against the company.  Or two.

Oh, and don’t let me start talking about Circuit City’s “Firedog.”  They have their own insider employee confessionals as well.

This is what happens when you engage in a race to the bottom, hiring salespeople that are morphed into “computer technicians” that will accept the lowest pay imaginable in a skilled trade while still getting the job done just barely good enough to shut the customer up, and if they get a few of the customer’s private nude photos to add to their collection (or a video of the customer showering), so much the better.  I guess the notions of “privacy” and “paying people what they’re worth” and “hiring experienced employees” and “making the customer happy” don’t matter when it’s all about the quarterlies, baby!

Honestly, I’m surprised that those two big box stores stay in the computer service business at all, given the horrible track records they’re developing.  I used to debate starting yet another computer service business until I came to the realization that these stores aren’t even close to being called my “competitors.”  After all, how much competing does Tritech really have to do when the biggest and best-known “competitors” are in the process of self-destruction?  It’s half depressing and half exciting, but one thing is for sure:  because of their failures, the door has been opened wide for the success of companies like mine that haven’t developed a disconnect from the customer’s needs in favor of the almighty dollar.

The ultimate irony?  Geek Squad and Firedog, in their attempts to gain as much money as possible while paying out as little as possible, actually lose more money to their poor customer service than they would to hiring good people and paying them what they’re worth.

If you are from Best Buy and would like to hire me as V.P. of customer relations while simultaneously preventing me from slowly eroding your business due to my superior philosophies on customer service and strict ethics enforcement, please email jody@nctritech.com with what you have to offer.  Thanks!

How to Fix/Rebuild a Very Corrupt Outlook .PST File

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

There’s a very well-hidden program called “scanpst.exe” stuffed in an obscure folder (For Outlook 2000, Outlook XP, Outlook 2003, and older, it’s at “C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MAPI\1033”) that will check and repair a damaged .pst file, and sometimes save your bacon when Outlook complains about a busted .pst file and won’t start. However, in one case we received at Tritech, the scanpst.exe tool detected no issues, yet Outlook XP continued to report “2,847 unknown errors sending” for one item in the outbox that, strangely enough, could not be moved, sent, or deleted. When something like this happens, it’s good evidence that there’s something screwy with the .pst file and you might need to move to a new one. But how to accomplish this feat?

  • Step 1: Close Outlook. Completely. That means it has to be 100% NOT open; sometimes Outlook actually takes a little while to close after it disappears. If in doubt, press Control+Alt+Delete to pull up Task Manager, hit the Processes tab, click on every “OUTLOOK.EXE” listed and hit [End Process] for each.
  • Step 2: Open the “Mail” control panel. Click on “Data files.” You will see a list of Outlook data files that are currently loaded into the mail subsystem in Windows. You need to create a new data file, and be sure to give it a name other than “Personal Folders” at the top, so you won’t get confused in the next steps. The other options you pick really don’t matter; you can accept the defaults for everything and it’ll be fine. Don’t set a password for the .pst file unless you want to make your life painful, though!
  • Step 3: After you see your new data file appear in the list, hit OK or Close to return to the Mail control panel. Hit the first button (it should say something about E-mail accounts), and if you get another screen asking what it is you want to do with E-mail accounts rather than just getting the list, hit the button for managing existing accounts and click Next. At the bottom, under the list of mail accounts, there is a drop-down box for the “default mail delivery location.” CHANGE THIS to match the name of the new file that you created earlier. (If you have two “Personal Folders” entries, you didn’t name it earlier, so choose the LAST file in the list and it should be the correct one.) Then click OK or Close.
  • Step 4: Click on [Data files] again, and the new data file should have an indication that it is now the “default mail delivery location.” This will then allow you to remove the old data file from the list, which is safe to do, so go ahead and toss it now to prevent possible confusion later. Click OK or Close after you’ve removed the old file from the list.
  • Step 5: Close the Mail control panel. Open Outlook again. You may receive warnings about the things you’ve just changed; this is normal and you can simply click through them. You should now have a new, empty set of folders, with no contacts or mail whatsoever. The last step is to bring all of your old mail, contacts, tasks, etc. into the shiny new empty folders file. Go to File, then Import and Export. Choose to import from another program or file, and click Next. In the list, choose to import an Outlook personal folders file (.pst), and click Next again. If you are asked about how to import duplicates, choose to “replace duplicates with items imported” (though technically it shouldn’t matter which you pick). When you finally receive a blank in which to specify the file to import, click Browse.

If you don’t immediately see a file or set of files called something like “Outlook,” “Archive,” “outlook.pst,” “archive.pst,” or similar, you’ll need to manually specify where the file is located, but in my experience you are usually placed in the correct folder without having to fish for it. Choose the original file (highly likely to be “outlook” or “outlook.pst” as that is the default) and click OK. Once you click Next, you’ll get a list of folders and some more import options; the defaults are OK, so click Next (or Import or OK). Voila! You’ve successfully moved your mail from the damaged .pst file to a new one! You could say that you’ve rebuilt the PST database from scratch.

If you need help locating the Outlook folder where these .pst files are stored, it is located in the following path on a typical installation: “X:\Documents and Settings\your_user_name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook” where X: is replaced with your system drive letter (98% of the time it’s “C:”) and your_user_name is replaced with your Windows login name. Local Settings is a hidden folder, so when you browse to your user name folder, you may have to type (with the quotes included) “Local Settings” into the File blank to proceed further. It can be tricky, but if you are persistent, you should be able to locate it. The Windows search tool in the Start menu may also be helpful; just be sure to set the option “search hidden files and folders” if you use it.

The worst kind of computer virus to catch…

Posted on by Jody Bruchon

Today I ran into two very troublesome situations.  One was a failing hard drive on a long-time client’s laptop, chock full of important information, but luckily the failure was gradual enough to cause serious speed issues and force them to call me before the whole thing could become a toaster.  The other was a far more difficult scenario: another returning client who uses the computer to run his business had somehow managed to pick up the worst class of computer virus I can think of: an executable-infecting virus.

You see, what these horribly nasty viruses do to your computer renders them essentially incapable of being repaired and returning to “like it never happened” functionality.  In case you don’t know, an “executable” is a term for the actual file that your icons run to start the program of your choice.  Essentially, they are the program.  A virus that infects executables will insert the virus code into the actual program file that you run to start software…including Windows itself.  I’ve only seen two infections before today that involved this class of virus, and the first one completely latched into everything, forcing a total wipe and reinstall.  The second one was not quite as “zealous” and didn’t infect things as readily, so I was able to recover that system from pending doom.  Today, however, is the second time I have encountered this type of infection to a point that I was incapable of repairing it.  My clients can tell you that I don’t play around on the computer: I know what I’m doing and I boast extremely high success rates where other “technicians” fail miserably.  I’d estimate that out of a random sample of 50 jobs, I have to do some sort of Windows reinstall on only about 1-2 of them.

Despite having six years of all-day-every-day experience tirelessly working to find every imaginable way to repair every computer problem under the sun without “major surgery” like reinstalling Windows, today I had to give in to the reinstallation machine that I so dreadfully despise, but I don’t regret doing so.

You must come to understand that even Windows itself is composed of hundreds of executable files.  They are often hidden behind the scenes and carry names such as “winlogon.exe” and “svchost.exe” and “ctfmon.exe” and “userinit.exe” and “logonui.exe,” and none of these should really ring a bell in your mind because you’re not supposed to know that they’re floating back there.  However, every single one of these files can be infected with a virus like this one.

Let’s put it this way: when you boot your computer, Windows loads a bunch of drivers, this thing called the HAL, and the NT kernel.  Basically, a bunch of really critical core stuff that makes everything else in the machine tick.  Once the pretty blue background pops up, however, those executables start firing off one by one.  svchost.exe starts in the background numerous times so that your sound card, automatic updates, Internet connectivity, and other system services can start working.  When you log in, logonui.exe runs, and then userinit.exe kicks in as well.  The ever-popular explorer.exe loads and shows you your icons and Start menu.  Any software you have installed may have startup items, such as the Adobe Reader Speed Launcher (reader_sl.exe) or the various America Online core services.

To bring all that irrelevant-sounding blah-blah-blah into perspective, nearly every single thing that runs in the list above gets infected with this kind of virus almost immediately once your machine is compromised. That means that Windows becomes a living virus.  The system is infected everywhere.  You can’t even boot halfway without running the virus itself, which then reinfects anything you may have cleaned.  Got Adobe Creative Suite?  They’re probably all toast–infected with the virus.  Hearts?  Infected.  Solitaire?  Infected.  Norton 360?  Infected.

I hope that this admittedly lengthy explanation brings you to appreciate the skills of a good computer technician (as well as the skills of the virus authors, who we’d all probably love to strangle one day), and the true importance of practicing good security habits when using your computer.  When I originally wrote the spyware and viruses page on the company website, my intent was to help you jump-start your computer security knowledge (and break some of the misinformation that exists today), and I hope you’ll read it now if you haven’t done so already.

I need to add this detail to said page, but I will dispense it here so that it will be clear: once your computer is compromised, you have NO SECURITY AT ALL!!! Modern viruses use rootkit-like technologies to hide themselves from virus scanners and bypass security measures such as software firewalls.  If you are compromised, security software is essentially rendered useless. Prevention should be your goal, not mitigation after compromise.  Don’t click on anything or say “yes” to anything unless you are 120% certain that it is legitimate.  Get Mozilla Firefox to avoid the plethora of security holes in Internet Explorer.  Take the time to find out what can get you in deep doo-doo when browsing the Internet (“free porn” searches are the biggest culprit, though many wouldn’t admit it–see that “.exe” at the end of the file name?!  It’s amazing how easy it is to infect a computer when the user is desperately looking for free porn and will download and run anything to get it.)  Most importantly, if your computer seems to be slower than usual, or pausing more frequently than is normal in your daily experience, do not hesitate to call a verifiably experienced computer technician to diagnose the problem.  If your water heater sprung a tiny water leak, would you hesitate to call a plumber, or would you try to patch it up until the pressure caused the leaking part to explode?

I can’t even begin to explain how frustrating it is to walk into a loyal client’s house to discover that the problem actually started months ago, and became disastrous because they chose to “live with it” and let it grow and compound rather than call me up and ask for a little bit of free assistance.  (Any computer business worth their salt will take five minutes to talk to you at no charge.  It’s called “customer service” and it gets left out a lot with many large businesses these days.)  When I perform computer services, it is a very personal matter for me, because the results of my work (short- and long-term) define what people think of me and my skills, and I can’t do my job for someone properly if they don’t tell me that there’s a problem.

If you take anything away from reading this post, (A) learn how to avoid danger on the Internet in the first place, and (B) don’t hesitate to call an expert when things may be getting beyond your control.