Computer Tech Hell

[paint]

Hay all

I fix ocmputers out of my home. With all the Spyware and Viruses I
see in computers. I am thinking that it it would be faster to Wipe
out the hardrive and reinstalling a new system than to spend hours
trying to hunt down all the little bugers.

What do you all think or what do you think could be a good
alternative to wiping. I am trying to find the fastest way to fix there
problems, as to save them money and my time.

I can't see charging 200 - 300 bucks chasing spyware and viruses when you can buy a new dell for 400 bucks. I also do not want to charge someone 150 duckets to work for 12 hours chasing all the crap. Do you know I ran spybot on a 16 yr olds computer and it had 6000+ spyware found try chasing that nightmare.


Any other techs having this dalema?

Thanks

Michael
Houston

[Abbadon]

Welcome to the guide!

I ussually give them 3 options:

1) pay me a truckload of money to do The Big Hunt, I can't tell you when you'll have your system back and/or wether everything will work perfectly
or
2) pay me much less money, I do "format c:" and reinstall the whole system, they have their pc back two days later at the latest and it will run smoother then they can ever remember.
or
3) hey mister! why not give this old thing to me and I'll build you a brand new one for a very good price!

Needless to say, most people prefer option 2 :)

I have a few regular curstomers who "don't believe" in firewalls. I keep ghost immages for their systems on my hard drive so their systems only cost me about an hour from drop off to pick up, but those are exceptions of course.

[pave_spectre]

I've been lucky and my spyware cleanups have been dealt with by ad-aware or spybot without any need for major hunting, so most of the work involved me doing something else while the scans ran. I didn't charge a whole lot for those since I was able to use the time productively on other things, but if you have to go in and find and remove nasties manually then that can take a chunk of time that will cost.
Abbadons options are probably pretty good ones to give (Except option three if the machine already happens to be brand spanking new :D)

[Steve]

Interesting thread. Here's my take on it. I charge $65 for the first hour and $35/hr. for each hour there after. So for $100 you can get 2hrs. of my labor. If I'm not confident that I can clean out the malware in two hours, I recommend that I backup what I can and reinstall. Either way, I can get most of them running for $100 or under.

As time goes on, I'm really starting to see the value in a separate partition or HDD with a good backup of your C: drive on it. It makes the process of clearing malware much cheaper.

[yawningdog]

I must be missing something. I install ad-aware and it runs in about 20 minutes and does a fine job. Same for Symantec anti-virus. What's all this "hunting down" you speak of?

[Budfred]

You can also refer them to the various forums that provide help cleaning this stuff up... If you don't want to lose the business, learn how to clean the garbage out more efficiently... It rarely takes more than an hour or two if you have the tools and you are dealing with most of the common problems... If it is a HackerDefender or something along those lines, it makes more sense to offer the more drastic option of a wipe/reinstall...

[PrntRhd]

Burning the common diagnostic and removal tools to a CD-ROM is one way to speed up service, no download time wasted, and Sylvander's flow charts printed out and tacked to the wall helps too.