We’ve been offering Free Friday diagnostics at our Lawrence computer repair office. Our motivation for was to prevent our clients from getting taken in by scams. Recently, a TV news station caught Office Depot using their repair service to scam customers. These free scams take different forms, but they’re all out to get your money.
The Bait: A Free Checkup
Even a new computer can have problems out of the box, so who can resist a free checkup? You want the peace of mind everything is going to work right. You want your computing experience to be problem free. If you’re having a problem, these programs will identify it and suggest some fixes. Simple enough. That’s true not just for shops like Office Depot, but free online scans. A simple program tells you what’s wrong with your computer and optimizes it.
The Switch: Something is Wrong/It’s Gonna Cost You
This scam isn’t new to the computer industry. The car industry has been doing the “we found something wrong” scam for decades. These scams pretend to show you all sorts of problems with your computer. Since you’re not technical, you have no way of disputing this. Oh no. Malware! Bad drivers! Foreign IPs! That’s all going to cost you. Suddenly that free diagnostics turns out to be expensive. The technician makes a commission on the sale and offers to sell you a variety of products.
Why Our Free Diagnostics Are Different
Since there are so many scam diagnostics out there, we’re offering this as a service to the community. Just stop in on Fridays, no appointment necessary. We’ve invested in some great software for the Mac and PC to help us diagnose problems. When you stop in, we’ll run the software. Then we’ll give you some suggestions to optimize performance. We’ll even fix some basic stuff we see at no charge. We’re not going to upsell you. For most clients, we’re just getting a baseline so we can help you in the future. With your permission, we’ll also install some software that allows you to get remote support from us in the future. That saves you money over our standard office visit or onsite computer repair.
These diagnostics check for basic hardware and software problems . They also give you an early warning system for other hazards. We’ll make sure your antivirus is working and your backup system is up to date. If you have a backup system, we’ll check that at no charge. These diagnostics take about 15 minutes. You’re welcome to leave your computer there for some advanced screening.
We’re Here to Help You
Our technicians are not commission based. Quite the opposite. We’re not a retail operation, so we don’t have much to sell. We don’t sell computers, we don’t stock upgrades, and we don’t have ongoing services to sell you. We do computer repair in Lawrence as well as Topeka, and Kansas City.
Our goal is to keep you up and running. If we find something wrong, you’re welcome to have us fix it at our standard rate. However, some clients are fixing it themselves after getting advice from us. Sometimes we tell you it just isn’t worth fixing based on the age of the system. If you read our Google reviews, you’ll see that as a common theme.