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In our recent post about techs in big box retail stores, "Not all PC techs are created equal", we spoke about how little the major retailers care about the abilities and range of service techs can provide.  Best Buy just announced they are culling the Geek Squad ranks to remove all service positions related to in-home audio-visual and appliance setups, totalling over 600 soon-to-be unemployed service techs.  What sets aside many store-bound service techs from the ones in the field is the field techs often are far more qualified as technicians, and are not only able to work directly in their own field, but be able to span multiple disciplines of technology.  Instead of directly repurposing these workers with multiple talents, they are removing the position and giving them severance pay.  During this years Super Bowl ads, they alluded that the stores would provide the best-trained and most innovative staff, but it would seem they are going against that idea altogether.

It used to be that shutting down a computer frequently would stress out the hardware and cause it to fail earlier.   With the advances in power-saving technology as well as the quality of certain components over the last decade, that is no longer the case.  In fact, the longer a computer is kept powered on, especially with laptops and netbooks, the faster the computer will age and eventually fail.

Imagine taking your car to a dealership for service, then finding out that no one at the dealership actually does work on cars.  Instead, they call up someone in another country who does the work, while the guys you thought were working on your car sit back and watch.  Crazy right? 

The sad thing is that this model has been adopted by many of the big-box stores for computer repair (we won’t mention them by name, because we wouldn’t want to call out Staples and Best Buy on their practices (wait…    whoops…))

Let me start this off with a disclaimer, I am not a Mac fanboy. I have worked for 15 years with PCs, and the last time I used a Mac was in the computer labs at college over a decade ago. For many people, they represent a perfect computer. They are fantastic at many tasks, but I am not a user who needs one. For decades Apple advertisements, Cult-of-Jobs members and in-store "geniuses" would boast that Macs were invulnerable to viruses and malware. Unfortunately for Mac users, they are discovering that’s simply not the case. For every operating system, there are security holes that can be exploited in order to install malware. As the world found out in the past few months, Apple's OS X is no exception.

Looking for an easy speed boost for your PC without spending any money?  Windows uses a decent amount of resources just displaying graphical goodies like shadows under the mouse cursor and pretty buttons.  Try the following steps to reduce the amount of memory and processor speed that Windows itself robs you of with some of its graphical goodies.  You can enable or disable  the listed features in the menu as you go to fine tune what things you want to see or not.

As a technician, one of the most problematic phrases I run in to is:

It’s gone and I don’t have a backup.

Each time I hear this, it makes me cringe, knowing that this tech solution could be an uphill battle. Regular backups can help save you trouble, stress, and more importantly, if you are a business, money.