BS Consulting Technology Associates - "We are full of I.T."

07/16/2021

We appreciate your self diagnosis and opinion on what is wrong with your equipment, but please, in your best interest, describe the problem and allow us to either confirm your belief or dispute it.

If you want to tell us that you need a new screen assembly for your $2500.00 laptop because there is no backlight and we say that would be a liquid damage issue on the board and not a screen issue but you insist….you are going to spend a little under $500.00 to replace a screen that our usually under $200.00 liquid damage repair will fix with no new $340.00 screen..

The example from above is a portion of a recent “transaction”. Customer bought their own new screen assembly and we quoted $160.00 to replace. After replacing screen assembly with new one, guess what? Still no backlight. A much closer look at the board revealed some juicy mold causing a short in the circuit to light up the screen. Chemically cleaned and praise be to Jesus, We Have Light! I asked customer again if there were any spills had occurred and they insisted again, no. So I put the old screen into the box the new one arrived in and it was left here after customer picked up his repaired laptop.

Three days later customer called demanded a refund and telling his bank that services were not delivered. I *only* get paid when the job is complete. He convinced his bank that we did not provide service and they granted his chargeback. Besides a fairly nasty looking picture of a three day older screen showing horizontal lines along the bottom, we were never able to say for sure that the laptop in the picture is the one that we worked on. $160.00 of time was sucked out of us.

Customer committed fraud and that was their intention.

After 30 days had passed(Parts and equipment not retrieved by customers within 30 days are disposed of by best industry practices) the perfectly good screen was sold and installed for $300.00 to a college student who walked from the bus stop to drop off her laptop. Karma will cover the good and haunt the bad 500 times over.

We love us some Karma!

07/10/2021

We no longer accept credit cards, PayPal, or any other method of payment that has a “resolution center”, a “claim department”, or a “dispute process.”.

We make our money from labor and the services we provide. We don’t get paid until the service is complete. If the service is not able to be completed, we do not get paid. It is a very straightforward and logical method of when we ask to be paid and when we will accept being paid..

There are some people that are either unscrupulous, cheap, or just maintaining a historical stereotype that take advantage of dispute systems, chargeback policies, and essentially game the system leaving some businesses no reasonable defense against such fraudulent individuals.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you to those that have opened my eyes to the flaws in the system.

BTW…..electronic forms of payment have never been that significant in terms of dollars or percentage of method of payment. The number of disputes/chargebacks is also very insignificant. The world is moving in the opposite direction with credit cards, and EFT as it should be.

06/14/2021

Small Apple screws, and not so small Apple screws…..

05/11/2021

Here’s the view inside of a laptop one day after some liquid damage……

It’s not the liquid that caused it to stop working……It’s the living mass of mold.

We might be a little disgusted by the colors of our moldy friends, but they are often relocated somewhere else for less than $201.00 plus parts if needed.

Usually a 24 hour turn around if nothing needs to be ordered.

We do perform this work at our house, so if you are uncomfortable with that, the mold can continue to grow on a retail location shelf until they tell you that it cannot be fixed and you will need a new board and that will cost you $399, plus $175 labor.

They are in cahoots with the mold. Try not to be in cahoots with them.

01/29/2021

Broken as a default setting.

Replace those drives before they fail.

The way significant updates are delivered now is at the very least traumatic to storage devices.

Short form summary: Your drive is most likely to fail during a significant upgrade.

Here’s why: Updates used to be individual files, executables, dolls, etc. The way it works now is an effort to clean up the clutter instead of just piling it on in a never ending growth of base computer needs storage.

Major Updates are image based. Crafty!

A new partition is created. Your personal settings, documents, files, additional software is copied to that new partition. Registry information about your software is exported to the new partition. Major update is downloaded to new partition. Original partitions are wiped, recreated. Major Update is installed on a clean partition, your settings, files, programs and unique registry information is imported into the clean installation. The temporary partition is killed, your computer restarts, and all is good in the world. Very intensive on the drives. Manages to write over the drive quite a bit....disturbing data recovery efforts. This is all happening in the “Please wait....”. Or “Do not shut off your computer” phase of screen staring.

You would be wise to follow the advice as displayed on the screen as well as what I offer you.

Most of you won’t and that is what truly keeps me in business.

01/14/2020

Just a suggestion.

Cameras are everywhere. They are getting less expensive every day. A camera system in your car is there for when you need it. The one I am suggesting through the EBay link is mostly a hidden system—if you take a few minutes to hide the power wire and rear camera cable. It attaches over your existing rear view mirror. This would be a new mirror that has a built in 4.3” screen. The only thing missing is a class 10 32 GB SDMicro card.

With the 32 GB card, you css as n have this at your door for the low low price of: under $30.00.

If you are ever issued a citation for running a red light, the recording of your passage could very well prove your innocence. If someone runs into your car either front of rear, you will have the proof needed that can show they hit you. Hit and run driver? At a minimum you’ll have some pretty pictures of them running. I had some yahoo try and run a scam on me a couple of years ago. He was pretty adamant about calling the police. “Look at my car. look what you have done. It still has dealer tag. I need police report and insurance.”. He talked like that. I left out the excitement expressive exclamation points. I told the man I have video of my car sitting still. He said “Does not matter. You hit me.” I started getting a little pi**ed. So I said. “Yes, calll the police and an ambulance as well, because my neck is hurting.” Told the dude: “If you pursue this, I’m not going to show you the video until court. Then I am going to collect some damages after they charge you with insurance fraud. Would you like to see the video now or later?”. He sat in the passenger seat. Saw the display. Did not even watch the video. Just got out and left. I checked it before I even got out of the car to make sure I did not hit his car. I was laying on the horn when he was within five feet of my car. Why would I be honking the horn?

That $30.00 camera set up saved me an untold number of hours. It’s cheap insurance.

Now, it can work against you if you are in an accident and it is your fault. Be aware of that. They will be standard issue on all cars in the near future. Black boxes that will permanently store crash data, speed, weather conditions, traffic, it will even tell you that you had a turn signal light out that you have been ignoring for 7 years. If I can find the video, I’ll post it as a comment.

Here is the link.

EBay:

Front view mirror car dvr x 1. It is applicable to all types of vehicle. It is perfect solution to get rid of poor visibility on your car, trailer, truck, or any vehicle that has no rear-view mirror or poor rear vision.

10/12/2018

How life began on Earth is very similar to how life begins in your laptop after adding (just about any)liquid to it.

Yeah, it's pretty gross actually. Bits of skin, food, bacteria, whatever falls off your head, etc...they all end up inside your laptop. Mostly inert items in a warm, dry, environment. These items are just waiting for a catalyst. Some liquid of just about any color or flavor. Once it arrives in the nice warm environment of your laptop, it explodes into life and starts spreading everywhere it can. And this is what causes your laptop to do funky things, like not work correctly or in many cases, not at all. New life inside your laptop causes a short in the tiniest of circuits that no amount of rice or any other desiccant will fix.

We have a very high success rate of eradicating the new lifeforms with a chemical cleaning and bring your laptop back to its former state without replacing anything other than the keyboard(Modern laptop keyboards actually have a pseudo liquid chemical conductor that gets washed away during a spill and I have yet to come across the right stuff to make those keys work again).

Give us a call at 404.324.0728 to set up an appointment to have your liquid damaged laptop repaired or to find out more. Oh, if you spill milk into your nice warm laptop that smell will never go away no matter what we do to it. Sorry.

06/14/2018

The cost of SSD's(Solid State Drives) is now affordable for all and cheap enough that on a three year replacement cycle, the price difference between a regular 500 GB Hard Drive and a 500 GB Solid State Drive is less than double the cost. A 500 GB regular hard drive can be found now for @$50.00. A 500 GB SSD can be found for @$100.00 now if you shop around. 1 TB prices have not fallen as quick. Still over $350.00 for a 1 TB SSD while a mechanical 1 TB drive can be had for maybe $60.00 daily.

The speed improvements outweigh the longevity and sudden failure risks because the cost is much better for most people who only need a 500 GB hard drive.

Want this upgrade in performance? Get in touch with us.

09/05/2017

3 Years on a laptop, and 5 years on a desktop. This is the schedule of replacement you should consider in replacing the storage device on your computers. They all fail over time. Solid State Drives included. If you want to extend the life of your computer with much less of a chance of data loss, get on a schedule of replacement of these parts. If you don't want to follow a schedule, please consider buying an external USB hard drive and backing that computer up on a regular basis. Even a once a year full system backup is better than nothing. When the computer starts getting slow and the hard drive activity light stays lit constantly when it is being slow, chances are good that the drive is beginning to fail---computer is having trouble reading from the device....take action. Either replace the drive or backup the system. Don't put it off as the longer you wait the more likely it is your data will be more expensive to recover.

If you would like for us to ensure your data is safe by either setting up your backup or replacing your drives on a 3 years for a laptop or 5 years for a desktop schedule, get in touch with us. We do it all the time, and we see all the time that there are no backups when the drives fail, and it will eventually.

The cost of drive replacement before it fails is much less expensive than after it fails. Your files, programs, and settings are able to be transferred to a new drive while it is still working correctly. After failure, it is data recovery and re installation of everything onto a new drive.

05/19/2016

For anyone not wanting the forced upgrade to Windows 10, here is the application that can prevent this---at least until Microsoft finds a work around....

http://www.majorgeeks.com/mg/get/gwx_control_panel,1.html

GWX Control Panel will help to rid your system tray of the 'Get Windows 10' notification from continually popping up....

04/08/2016

R.I.P 500 GB SSD..... 6.15.2015---4.8.2016

Even though you have a fast Solid State Hard drive with no moving parts or mechanical parts to fail on you, do full system backups on a regular basis. When these drives fail, they usually fail in a very fast way leaving little room for recovery options.

Backup your data people. I can do this for you if you so desire.

Proactive replacement schedule for regular hard drives is 3 years on laptops and 5 years on desktops. Replace them before they fail on you, keep the original in a safe place as a backup.

SSD's are getting better, but not good enough to last forever unfortunately...

08/27/2014

Something I have been playing around with for a while now.....some of you may find useful.

Ads placed on many websites are the primary reason for slow loading, non-responsive, and crashing web browsers on certain sites. Removing the offending pieces of advertising improves the speed and performance of your web browsing activity. If you just don't want to see a majority of ads, the solution below will take care of that as well.

Fix is pretty simple if you want to try it out:

Open up your network connections: Go to Properties, then TCP/IP, then check the box to manually specify which DNS servers you are using. Enter in the following DNS servers:

209.148.83.210
and
23.239.130.225

Once these have been entered and you hit apply, OK, and close out the boxes, go to a site like www.ajc.com or www.wsbtv.com and see if it works better for you now.

These changes can be undone by going back to the DNS settings and checking the box to Obtain DNS servers automatically.

Try not to share this post too much, otherwise the advertisers will find a workaround that may be harder to combat.