PC Repair Clients Never Learn? Consider A Watch Dog…

In general, it has been my experience that locking things down for the home user can be a lot more challenging that it is for the enterprise user. Unfortunately, it is often times the home based PC user that needs the iron fist of common sense.

OK, so obviously restraint and common sense are not too likely to prevail here. It is because of this that you will need to begin exploring options that will allow you to maintain some level of control over the amazingly foolish things to do their PCs.

Speaking for myself, I generally found that implementing some of the following really helped to give me an edge with most of my past repair clients:

• Set their PC up to do the work for them. Yes, this must sound really obvious. And yet, people still neglect to do this when finishing up most repair jobs. If you can convince them to simply leave their PCs on. Then you can configure most things to take care of themselves while your clients are sleeping. This has worked great for me over the years.
• Consider a good watch dog. Seriously, I have had to install WinPatrol on a number of PCs over the years simply because it helps to nail things down quite nicely. On the flip side, it also pays to make sure that your clients are not running as administrators whenever possible. Teach them to use the good ‘ol “Run As” feature built into XP whenever possible.

Do you have some other thoughts that you’d like to share? Perhaps you have found that the threat of doubling your rates has turned your clients into overnight geeks? Whatever the solution, I’d love to hear about it as always. My email link is at the top as always.

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