When the Expert Help Doesn’t Quite Work
A day in IT can mean a big difference. This is certainly the case for a local mechanical business who first called us around 10am one morning with ‘computer problems’. An hour later I was onsite with Brad – one of our computer techs finding an absolute kaleidoscope of problems in a business that had recently spent heaps on updating their computers.
This business only had a total of 3 computers in their office and had purchased three new HP all-in-one PC’s for around $4500. Then for the entire week previous to our visit they had had two computer ‘techs’ from another IT company onsite to sort out their network. I had seen the invoice for this work – another $3500 in labour alone, and we were looking at the results!
I could not see ANY value for money in what had been done and the proof of this was evident as the customer was not able to operate their computers effectively. We were there for an hour just to get the Internet and Emails working properly and then I had two techs spend the afternoon onsite to sort out the remaining problems. Our total cost to the customer was $1000 in labour and a further $600 in parts and software, but now EVERTYHING works just great – so what did we do?
To start with ADSL filters were needed on their fax and EFTPOS machines – this is why their internet was dropping out around 20 times a day. Email settings needed to be changed in Outlook so that they could send and receive larger attachments – which previously locked the system. All three of their PC’s needed to be upgraded from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional.
The Mechanical business was also running the multiuser version of QuickBooks between all of these PC’s but one of them was still on a wireless connection which just doesn’t work properly. We did the operating system upgrade, put in a network cable and a gigabit network switch – this has a pronounced positive effective on networking a large tax package file. We uninstalled all of the generic HP junk software as well as the free version of AVG (illegal in a business environment) and installed software which was required such as our Trend Micro anti-virus.
We then had to make one of the three PC’s behave as the master PC or ‘server’ and transfer all of the data off the other PC’s to it. Because all of the company’s’ important data was then in the one place we were able to deploy a simple one click 20 second backup system to be used and taken off site at the end of each day (the pervious IT company had not suggested or offered ANY backup system).
Needless to say, we now have another good customer which will be with us for many years to come – they could not believe the difference and that all of the changes could be done in less than one day. Modern small businesses are totally reliant on outsourcing their IT needs from a company such as ours and we have a responsibility to get it right.
I still have no idea what the previous IT Company actually did for $3500 and having two techs onsite for almost a week – it is impossible to fathom. Apparently the owner of this previous company had not ventured onsite but was happy to both invoice and take payment for a service that had proved useless.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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