The Red Brick Times

Recently a business acquaintance of mine asked if I could help him with his home PC. It had become extremely slow, both at boot up and when running, and was constantly displaying pop-up ads, some of which were clever enough to appear as though they were legitimate prompts from the programs he was using. Yep, you guessed it, a spyware/malware issue. A few weeks prior to asking my help he'd hired a local computer firm to deal with the problem. They sent a tech out (at $100/hr) who tried to hunt down and delete the responsible files and sold him a router with firewall capabilities. $400.00 later everything seemed ok, but in a week or so things were just as bad as before (after a certain infection point you can't just delete files as core portions are resident in memory and merrily reinstalls itself as soon as you walk away). I fixed it, but only by bringing the PC home and 1) destroying the existing hard drive partitions, 2) creating new ones, 3) reinstalling the operating system from scratch, 4) reinstalling all drivers and, 5) reloading all programs. Took me most of a day even though he (luckily) had all the needed original CDs and very little data to be saved. This was a radical fix but in some cases it's the only viable option. I also installed some software to help avoid future problems of the sort. When I took it back I spent an hour teaching him and his family how to use the software I installed and general things to be aware of on the internet today. The bill I presented (I don't do this for free y'know) includes a final visit in two weeks to check up on the PC and answer any questions they may have.

The internet is not a friendly place for home users anymore. Without proper protection and practices people who get cable/DSL connections at home have no idea what they're letting themselves in for. When I stop to add it up it's amazing how much of my time is spent dealing with stuff like this, and I'm not just talking about home users, but in established companies as well. That started me wondering.......

What do you think about a company whose business plan is to service local home users who find themselves in a similar situation? Maybe offer to do the initial cable/DSL hookup so it doesn't happen to begin with? I mean as a part time/sideline sort of thing. Overhead would be practically nonexistent and inventory would be not much more than a few routers. Think it would fly? How could it be efficiently and effectively advertised? What fees would be acceptable? Would you consider using it? Anybody interested in doing some of the non-techy work involved?
Posted 4:54 PM by whatley (0) comments

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