Client Success Story: My Own Computer

by

Just because I run a computer repair business doesn’t mean that I don’t have computer problems of my own every now and again.

Just last week I came into the office my usual hour early, 9 AM sharp, so that I could get all the wonderful paperwork that comes with running a business done, and when I went to boot up my main office laptop, nothing happened. After double and triple checking that everything was plugged in and connected properly I tried pressing the power button again. Still nothing.

I checked the time and saw that it was only five after, meaning that I had plenty of time to get everything up and running before it was time to open the doors.

After doing a bit of troubleshooting, I soon found out that my trusty old work laptop had finally decided to go to the old electronic recycling center in the sky. It was as dead as the proverbial door nail.

It was now a quarter after nine, but I still had plenty of time.

I grabbed a laptop from off the shelf, and loaded up my preferred Operating System – Ubuntu, a flavor of Linux – and set everything up the way I needed it to be. I loaded all the programs that I use day to day to run the business, and got those set up too.

Now it was 9:40, and I only had twenty minutes before my first appointment of the day.

Fortunately, over the past few years I’ve made it a habit to back all my important data, including all the stuff I need for the office, up to the internet. Restoring my data was going to be easy. All I had to do was download my cloud drive software – I like Dropbox – sign in, and give it a few minutes to let everything sync up.

The clock said that it was now ten minutes ‘till ten.

Just enough time to make myself a cup of tea before greeting the first client of the day.

The moral of the story is that having good backups turned what could have been a serious catastrophe for my small business into nothing more than a minor inconvenience.. A small hiccup that was easily put behind me so that I could focus on what was really important – solving these sorts of problems for my clients.

How would you handle this sort of situation? Would this be a serious problem, or no big deal? Call No Ware Computer Repair today to learn how to protect yourself and your business from the unexpected.

Client Success Story: The Magic Touch

by

Not every computer we work on requires a long and complex solution. Sometimes all it takes is a little patience… And the magic touch.

The other day a lady came in to our office with an older Windows 7 laptop in tow, saying that the laptop just wouldn’t turn on anymore. She said that when she pushed the power button it seemed like the laptop got power, lights would come on and she could hear the fan spinning, but the screen would remain dark.

As she was setting the laptop, the power cord, and that laptop’s battery on the counter, she began telling me that she wanted to make sure that the laptop was turned off, but since she couldn’t see the shutdown button on the screen, she decided to just removed the battery.

Obviously under a great deal of stress and talking a mile a minute, she told me that this laptop was used for her business, and was in a hurry to get it fixed. She thought that maybe the screen had gone out, and might need to be replaced.

She then told me that she had just made the trip up to Grand Junction from Montrose to have the her laptop looked at, since over the past could of days she had taken the laptop to a couple places in Montrose, and was told that since the laptop was older, they couldn’t get the parts needed to fix the screen.

Before looking up how much it would cost to replace this laptop screen, I wanted to be absolutely sure that the screen was the problem in the first place. I wanted to connect the laptop to an external monitor and run a few quick tests, so I put the battery in the laptop, and pressed the power button, and everything came on like it should.

The poor lady obviously surprised by this unexpected turn of events, but I had a funny feeling that I knew what had just happened. I asked if it was still okay to check on a few things and then started poking around.

I asked if he had recently done any Windows updates, and she said that she had, right before the screen stopped working.

I knew right then what the problem was.

I ran some quick hardware and software tests, just to make sure that nothing else was wrong with the laptop. What I found confirmed my suspicions.

It seemed as if there was a bit of a hiccup with a Windows 10 Update, and by removing the battery and power cord, the lady inadvertently did a CMOS reset, which allowed windows to boot up and finish it’s update.

Everything else about the computer was in perfect working order.

Absolutely delighted, the lady reached for her wallet and asked me how much she owed for the repair. I told her that all I did was poke around a bit, I didn’t really fix anything, so there was no charge.

With a huge smile, the lady grabbed a handful of business cards and said that she was going to tell everyone about how helpful we were. I smiled and told her that that was exactly what I liked to hear.

She grabbed her laptop, and bounded out the door.

It wasn’t until then that I realized that I had forgotten to ask her name.

Regardless, helping our clients is the name of the game. If there’s anything that No Ware Computer Repair can help you with, please give us a call, drop us a line, or swing on by our office in Grand Junction. We’re always happy to help!

windows update failure

Client Success Story: Farmer’s Friend

by

High tech farming
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Grand Junction isn’t exactly a bustling metropolis, and that the surrounding area is still home to many small farms and ranches.

Will, the owner of one of these small farms in rural Mesa County uses his computer to run his farm. He uses spreadsheets to keep track of his fields – how much of each nutrient and fertilizer that he puts in each plot. He also uses a digital almanac and weather apps to preconfigure his numerous sprinklers and automatic watering systems.

So when Will’s computer froze up after a Windows update a couple months ago, he was in a bit of a panic. Whenever he would turn the computer on, he was met with a black screen and nothing more. It was the middle of planting season, and the worst possible time for Will’s computer to go on the fritz.

Every now and again one of Microsoft’s updates to Windows can occasionally cause a computer to become unbootable. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.

We were originally hoping that it would be a simple matter of just resetting the computer to a previous restore point, getting Will and his farm back up and running nice and quickly. Unfortunately, System Restore was turned off – as it is by default in Windows 10 – leaving us up the proverbial creek.

We would have to take a different approach.

We booted the computer up using a USB drive with Linux installed on it. From there we were able to transfer all of Will’s data – tons of spreadsheets and other documents – to an external Hard Drive.

Once we were sure that we got all of the data copied, we then reinstalled Windows 10 onto the computer. We made sure that all the drivers were installed, and the system was up-to-date. We then installed Microsoft Office, and Will’s almanac and weather apps.

Next we transferred all the data back onto Will’s computer, putting it in all the appropriate folders. We even changed the default wallpaper to the picture of Wills dog that he previously had as his background.

Finally, we ensured that System Restore was active, so that if something like this were to happen again, the downtime would be minimal.

With that all done, Will, and his farm, was back up and running. Just in time to finish planting.

Will was so happy that he promised to bring us a couple boxes of vegetables when it comes time to harvest.

We’re really looking forward to those veggies.

Client Success Story: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

by

About a month ago we had the pleasure of meeting Elaine. Elaine was passing through Grand Junction, on her way to one of the area’s many ski resorts.

Elaine liked to travel, in fact, since retiring she has spent a majority of her time traveling and taking pictures. Just like most everyone these days, Elaine takes her pictures using her smart phone. In fact, she takes so many pictures that she occasionally plugs her phone into her laptop to transfer all the pictures, so that she can make some room on her phone for more photos.

When Elaine turned on her laptop so that she could read the news while having her morning coffee in her hotel room, she was greeted with a black screen. She tried waiting, but nothing happened. Elaine then tried restarting the computer, but the screen remained black.

That’s when Elaine got on her phone and used Google to look for someone who could help.

Elaine called us, citing our reviews on Google, and told us about her situation. It sounded like Elaine was in a bit of a pickle, so we had her bring her laptop down to our office so that we could take a look.

While chatting with Elaine, we were told about how she uses her laptop as a way of storing all of the photos that she takes on her travels. Needless to say, she was extremely concerned about all of her pictures.

After assuring Elaine that we would do whatever we could to save all her pictures, we got to work.

It didn’t take long to determine that a botched Windows update was the reason that her computer wasn’t booting up. After doing a little more poking around, we decided that the best thing to do would be to pull all of the data, completely reinstall Windows 10, and migrate the data back on to the laptop.

We quickly learned that Elaine wasn’t kidding when she said that she has a lot of pictures on her computer. Almost 200 Gigabytes of photos alone had to be pulled off the laptop before we could proceed with reinstalling Windows. Once the pictures were backed up, everything else was a breeze.

When Elaine came to pick up her laptop, we had a brief sit-down, and discussed how she was backing up her photos, and brainstormed a better way for her to get the job done.

We ended up setting her up with Dropbox on her phone and computer, and taught her how to upload her files so that they would be saved in the cloud and synced to her laptop. She was absolutely ecstatic when she uploaded her first set of photos on her own.

After the work was done, we sat with Elaine for a while as she showed us some of the pictures from her many travels all around the world over a nice cup of green tea.

Is your computer giving you trouble? Call us now to see how No Ware Computer Repair can help you!

beach laptop

Client Success Story: Pulling a Client Out of the Fire

by

Data Recovery

A couple weeks ago we received a call from Kyle, meekly asking us if we happened to do data recovery. Specifically, if we could we recover deleted files from an SD card.  When he was told by the “big box geeks” that they couldn’t help him, he had started down the list of the Grand Valley’s computer repair services. When he got to our friends over at Computer Ambulance Service, they gave him our number.

We told the Kyle that data recovery was one of our specialties, and that we would definitely be able to help. That’s when he dropped the bomb and asked, “Can you have this done by 6 o’clock today? “We looked at the clock, and it was just after 2 in the afternoon, so we told him to bring by the SD card, and we’d see what we could do.

He zipped into our office, and after chatting for a few moments, the urgency of his situation became clear.

Kyle works for a rather large local property management company, and a big part of his job is to document work that was done on properties, as well as the condition of properties before someone moves in, and after they move out.

Apparently, they had someone leave one of the properties that they manage in a rather bad state of repair. So bad that it involved a court case. A case that was going before a judge the very next morning.

Kyle had done his job and took pictures of absolutely everything that the tenants had done to this house, and as he was getting all his stuff together for the hearing the next day he decided to take a look at the SD card, just to make sure that he had all the pictures ready for the next day’s hearing.

His heart absolutely sank when he loaded the card and saw that nothing was there. The files seemed to have vanished. We told Kyle that we would take a look at the SD card, and run some tests to see if the data was recoverable, after which we would give him a call to let him know what could be done.

After Kyle left, we immediately loaded the SD card into our data recovery workbench and ran the usual tests. There was much joy and relief felt in the office when we saw that the card was still accessible, and the missing files were recoverable.

We gave Kyle a quick call to let him know the good news, and his first question was “Can this be done before you close?” The clock now said it was almost 3 in the afternoon, we were going to be cutting it close. We rolled up our sleeves and got to work getting everything set up and configured to retrieve those missing photos.

Shortly before 5 the moment of truth had arrived. Taking a deep breath, we opened the recovery folder and there they were, hundreds of pictures, all with timestamps and everything.

We got everything transferred to a new USB drive, and gave Kyle a call, telling him that everything was done. With a touch of skepticism in his voice he said that he’d be right down.

Once Kyle got back to our office, we sat down and looked through all the pictures that we were able to recover.

As he scrolled through all the photos, a smile began to creep onto his face. “You really pulled my butt out of the fire here” Kyle said as he shook our hands.

“Thanks” we told him “we’re just doing our job”

Are you feeling the heat? Do you need No Ware Computer Repair to pull you out of the fire? Give us a call, or drop by our conveniently located office in Grand Junction, we’re always happy to help!

Client Success Story: Breathing New Life into Old Computers

by

Not too long ago, an old gaming laptop came through our doors. It was one of those “Republic of Gamers” machines that Asus was cranking out for quite a few years. This laptop was about five years old, and obviously well used. Our client, Bill, had paid a pretty penny for this machine all those years ago, but now it was having trouble keeping up with some of today’s games. He brought it in to us hoping that we could work a little upgrade magic to improve the performance and make this old machine game-ready again.

We had a long talk with Bill we learned that he had recently retired and like to spend some of his newly acquired spare time playing video games. After accessing the situation with the laptop, we came up with a plan of action and got to work.

The first step was the hard drive. We replaced the old mechanical hard drive with an awesome new SSD, and then loaded up a fresh installation of Windows 10. Then working some of our data transferring wizardry we were able to copy his Steam library from his old Hard Drive onto this new one. This made all his games ready to go with at the click of a button.

Next, we upgraded his RAM from the 8GB that came with the laptop to a whopping 16GB. Which, combined with the new SSD, made this old beauty just as (if not more) zippy than some of the new gaming laptops that are just rolling off the factory line.

There is nothing better than being able to game on the go. Sadly, the battery in this beast was only holding enough of a charge to last barely an hour. So that too got an upgrade too! A brand-new battery that allowed game time for up to 6-8 hours when unplugged.

We finished everything off by giving the system a thorough cleaning and gently wiping down the case, to keep everything running nice and cool and looking extra sharp.

When everything was done, we called the Bill in to pick up his laptop. Upon arriving at the office, he could hardly believe his eyes. The first thing he noticed was how clean and tidy the machine was.

We had Bill boot up the computer and load up a game to see how speedy everything was after our upgrades. The ear to ear grin showed us that he was beyond pleased with the results of our work. With a gleam in his eye, Bill left with his revitalized computer with a spring in his step, obviously eager to get in some quality gaming time.

Do you have an old computer that could use some new life of its own? Bring it on down to No Ware Computer Repair in Grand Junction! We can give your old computer the 1up it so desperately needs.

Granddad gaming

Client Success Story: The Perfect Gift

by

Tech gift
Not all Christmas gifts have to be traditional. Sometimes something “outside the box” can be the most amazing gift of all.

Our client Ben’s wife had been holding on to a couple of old computers that had ceased to function years ago, because she just couldn’t bring herself to get rid of them. Recently, she had been talking about how upsetting it was that so many old papers from college, art projects, and photographs were stashed away in those old machines, perhaps never to be seen again. The only reason she has been holding on to these old computers for all these years was that she was hoping to one day retrieve the data that was locked away in them.

While doing some cleaning Ben stumbled across these dusty old computers. This gave Ben a brilliant idea for his wife’s Christmas gift this year, have the data recovered from the old machines as something of a surprise.

Ben dragged these antiquated boxes into our office early in December, telling us of his brilliant gift idea, and asking us if we can help, and get everything done in time for Christmas. Never being ones for disappointing our clients, we told Ben that we could get our little elves to work right away.

After getting everything in order, a couple of things occurred to us: 1) These computers were definitely old. One was an old Power Mac G4 from 1999, and the other a MacBook from 2006 or 2007. And 2) Since Ben would need everything done before the holiday, preferably with enough time for Santa to get everything gift-wrapped and under the tree, our elves would have to work quickly.

Ben's Power Mac G4 from 1999
Fortunately, we have the tools and know-how to make quick work of a job like this. After pulling the hard drives from these ancient dust traps, we were able to recover all the data from both computers, and copy it all onto a brand new portable hard drive. By using a portable hard drive, Ben’s wife would be able to access the data from any computer that the drive is plugged in to.

We were able to get everything taken care of in just a couple of days, giving Ben plenty of time to find a deceptively large and misshapen box to package this tiny drive into, wrap it up in some pretty paper (complete with bows), and stash it under the Christmas tree.

Mrs. Ben was overjoyed to unwrap her special present on Christmas morning, earning our client some extra brownie points for being so very thoughtful.

Do you have an old computer just sitting around because you can’t bring yourself to part with it just in case something can be done to save the data? No Ware Computer Repair can do just that! Call us now, we can work our “holiday magic” on your old computers all year long!

Client Success Story: Virtual Wizardry 2

by

Here at No Ware Computer Repair we get all kinds of clients with all kinds of issues walking through our door. Some of these more “interesting” issues can even be a learning experience for all parties involved!

Speaking of learning, we recently had a client come into our office who home-schooled his daughter, but was having a bit of a problem. He wanted to make sure that she had the best equipment for school, so he purchased a MacBook Pro for her to do her lessons on. The poor guy ran into a snag after getting everything home and all setup: The program used to supervise the home-schooling only worked with Windows and his daughter had an assignment due in 2 days.

After doing a little, research our client discovered Boot Camp, a program used for making a Mac dual-boot into different operating systems. The idea was to get a choice at the opening prompt asking to boot into Windows 10 or the Mac OS.  A brilliant idea in theory, but it was proving difficult in practice. This was why he came to us, for a little tutoring on how to make Boot Camp work.

After talking to the client, and assessing the situation, we suggested a different approach. Instead of a dual boot system, which could prove to be cumbersome by having to log out of the computer completely and reboot every time he needed to run this one program, we suggested that installing a virtual machine; using a program called Virtual Box, would be a better fit. Virtual Box allows you to be in your main Operating System, but run another Operating System almost like running a program. Applications can be launched from within that Operating System “program”.

With the computer left in our capable hands, we installed Virtual Box, set up a virtual instance of Windows 10, and installed the program that his daughter needed to use. We were able to have everything done the very same day that the client brought the computer in to us. When the client came to pick everything up, we gave him some directions and pointers on how to use everything. He was definitely pleased with this new, easy-to-use setup.

Sometimes the solution to a problem requires nothing more than a little creative thinking.

Got a computer problem? We’re always happy to help!

Virtual Box on MacOS

Client Success Story: New computers/new friends

by

New computer
No Ware Computer Repair is a people business, helping people with their computers is what makes it worth opening the doors every workday morning. However, we do more than fix computers, we also solve problems for our clients. In fact, problem solving is what we spend most of our time doing. It’s just that the problems that we specialize in solving happen to involve computers.

We recently met a new client, Jim, who had a custom computer that he built himself back in 2002. This computer was an absolute beast, a real thing of beauty. Every component was top-of-the-line back when he put everything together. It was no surprise that Jim was able to get so many years of usage out of this high-end machine. Unfortunately, as 15 years of usage went by, the computer became less and less able to do what Jim needed it to do. He brought it to us to see about an upgrade, but suspected it was time to let his piece of art go.

First, we ran the old computer through a series of diagnostics, confirming many of Jim’s suspicions. After fifteen years, the old computer had become like a family friend, and friends are always hard to let go of.

Since retiring a few years ago, Jim no longer needed such an extremely powerful system. We sat down with him, and determined his exact needs in a computer. After getting a firm grasp on Jim’s current computer usage and needs, we were able to recommend a system that would suit him perfectly.

Once the new computer arrived, we transferred all of Jim’s data over to from the old machine, and got everything set up on his new computer so that he could just plug it in and go. We tried to make the transition to a new computer quick and painless.

Whatever your computer and technology needs may be, No Ware Computer Repair is always ready to help.

Client Success Story – No WiFi

by

If you’re like over three quarters of all Americans, your household pretty much runs on the internet. There are laptops, desktops, TVS, cell phones X-Boxes, PS4’s, iPads, Kindles – the list of electronics that use the internet in our houses goes on and on and on. Some homes even have their refrigerators connected these days!

When one device starts bouncing on and off the internet, it can feel like our entire house, our jobs, and even our very lives practically fall back into the stone age.

Like most people in this situation, our client’s first response to his laptop losing its connection to the internet was to call his Internet Service Provider. The usual advice tech support gives to calls of this nature is to “power-cycle” the modem and router by unplugging it for about a minute, and then plugging it back in. This helped his laptop’s connection for a few days, but eventually he started losing signal again. The next step our client took was to replace the router, which again, worked for just a few days. Checking the signal strength on the many other devices in his house; the client figured out, his laptop was the only device that was having this problem.

He took the laptop to our local big box store, hoping to learn what was wrong with it. After a few days of being without his laptop, the store told him they had to, “send it to a depot in order to figure out exactly what was going on.”

Understandably frustrated with this “solution”, the client picked up his laptop the other morning and brought it in to us here at No Ware.

After running a couple of tests, we were able to determine that the wi-fi card on the laptop was going out and needed to be replaced. After installing a new card, we tested it to insure continuous connection, then a quick call to the client to let him know the issue was fixed, that same afternoon.

When our client came to pick up the laptop he let us know that he had chosen to bring the laptop to us based on all our collection of great reviews online. A collection that he promised to add to as soon as he got home with his laptop.

Big or small, we here at No Ware Computer Repair in Grand Junction will solve your computer issues. From virus removal to data recovery to hardware replacement, No Ware has your back!

WiFi!