Computer Repairs -- Going the way of the TV Repair Guy

[DaveLembke]

Was curious what others felt on this. I have been working on fixing computers since the late 1980s. And from the mid 1990s through up until about 5 years ago, I had been pretty busy fixing computers and making ok money on the side doing so. It seems that ever since the price for new computers dropped below the $500 price tag for new laptop and desktop computers my help with fixing computers has dropped off and instead I am getting inquiries from past clients asking what they should buy next in a list of computers with price tags of $249.99 through $399.99 that they were eyeballing as the replacement to their prior computer.

The Windows XP no longer being supported created a scare that many felt forced to have to buy new computers, and I ended up getting many free computers when people were looking for a means of getting rid of their old computers and they didnt want to have to pay to get rid of their old computers. This worked out for me because it gave me free guts to fix other computers with as well as it worked out in that I was able to take 2 of the systems and give them to my wife and daughter for them to have computers and they were free.

It may be more than just computers being cheaper which has caused a drastic drop off in computer repair needs. Today mobile devices are also more common and there is a market for fixing shattered touch screens on Smart Phones and iPhones but computers I just feel have turned into throw aways. People buy them new and when they have a problem, they just buy another low cost computer or in some cases I have some clients that have done away with their home computer and instead went to a large tablet instead.

I sort of feel like the TV Repair Guy did when TV's became so cheap that when they died, people just bought new TVs. I am glad I didnt invest a lot of money into the computer repair business. I still have many helpful tools, but back 8 years ago business was booming and I almost set up a shop locally for people to bring their computers to to have them serviced. I instead decided that the boom in business may be just a flash in the pan and not to pursue this business, but instead just remain on call as clients need me.

I still get some business, but the business is no longer can you fix my computer, but instead its, can you recover my data and place the data onto my new computer. For the fact that many people feel upset but can live without the gigs of data that they lost and just start over again, and only business owners mainly having a monetary value to their data the money making is only in those businesses that have critical info and the computer dead is holding the data hostage to them, so they pay to recover it. I additionally help my clients that are business owners to protect their data from loss, and so I suppose I shoot myself in the foot for setting up their data to be protected and so the odds of me having to help to get data back for them is far lesser than the first time that they came to me and had all their data on that one computer or server with no backups.

Looking forward with my services that I provide to people, hardware repair and data recovery is my strengths, and programming is a weakness of mine. To stay up with the times and remain diverse in IT, I am almost thinking that I will need to change away from hardware support which is going the way of the TV Repair Guy and that i should crack open a book and strengthen my programming skills and instead of trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none,... that i should stick with one language and try to master it and instead of using older IDE's like Bloodshed Dev C++ and VC 6.0, I should work with newer Visual Studio C++ as for there will be a future in people that require programmers, but computer repair techs are going the way of the dodo.

[Geek-9pm]

This is dictation. (You might see some funny things.    )
DaveLembke,
Your post got my attention. A few years ago I was in a situation very similar to what you describe. But now I am too old to do much work at all. But during the last two years I did get some extra income by selling some of my stuff on eBay. And I don't mean just computer stuff, I had a number of things I'd collected over the years that I was able to and recover some of my losses.
I also learned that it is possible to buy computers off of eBay and fix them up and make them work. In fact, most of the stuff I have bought off of eBay I was able to get to work and in some cases I was able to resell some of the items I purchased and reworked.
It seems there may still be an opportunity for knocker printer like yourself to take advantage of some of the things that are available through auction sites such as eBay or others.
Yes, I know, there are some swindlers and scams on eBay. But I believe that the refurbished computer business on eBay is very legitimate. Microsoft has certified these dealers to reload their computers with Microsoft operating systems. In some cases the computers came with Windows 7 and it seems that the people that are doing the refurbishing are reloading these systems with the OEM version of Windows 7 that was sold with the machine. Apparently that is perfectly legal. The machine came with an OEM Windows 7 license and after being repaired they reload it with the same OEM operating system. So the not breaking any rules.

Now here's what I think a person could do. Many people want to get a low cost computer that has the features they want and something they can be repaired or maintained for number of years. These refurbished computers that are available on eBay arm most often some type of Dell OptiPlex system. The later models of the optic Plex series were pretty good designs for general business use. They were never intended to be high-performance gaming computers. There are meant to be no-nonsense reliable business machines that could do the kind of work that has to be done in an office or small business. There must of been thousands upon thousands of these machines that were pulled off of leases and put onto the used computer market by either Dell or whoever was doing the leasing.
Here's what I think a person could do. By a few of these refurbished Dell computers that might have something a little bit lacking. The usually lack a keyboard and a mouse and no monitor. And in some cases they have a very small hard drive or not enough memory. Most of these come with  a dual core processor running about 2 GHz. So they are capable of doing fairly impressive things other than real fast gaining. Most of these can be upgraded to dedicated graphics and they would be more appealing to some individuals that one a better computer for playing games.
The price is right on these refurbished Dell computers. With the operating system installed and in working condition these sell for under $100 and come with a guarantee or warranty. For little bit less money you can get one that doesn't have a hard drive in it but still has the certificate of authenticity that would allow you to install the OEM version of Windows 7 on a new hard drive.
So there is a possibility of working with some people in your community that are looking for a good computer but would like to get it from somebody that will offer local support and six something in the goes wrong. Some of these people have already had bad experiences with store-bought computers and they end up with a box that doesn't work but they still have the monitor, keyboard and mouse. So these individuals might be willing to buy our reconditioned computer from you on the understanding that if something goes wrong with it your there to help them out and fix it.

Many users become frustrated when they find that the salesman at a local Best Buy or Walmart cannot explain to them how something works nor can they give them the assurance that the warranty will really help them out is something goes wrong. I still think there are many people that want some responsible individual in their community that they can rely on for their computer maintenance.
So that's my idea, I would do that myself except that I am getting so old and my recent sources are very, very slim. I just want to say that I have bought about three or four reconditioned Dell computers and I was satisfied that they all were in usable condition and I was able to derive some benefit from them. Unfortunately, I had a nice Dell desktop here that I was going to try to upgrade myself and I made some kind of a mistake and I must've damage the motherboard. So I'm going to quit trying to do this myself.
Now if you still have your skills and you don't make the stained stupid mistakes that I do, you could probably pick up a few of these refurbished computers or even one that is not completely working right, and resell it to some local customers and make a small but significant gain on the transaction. No, you not only get rich. But it would be one way to supplement your income if you are a senior citizen. Just a thought that I wanted to share with you.

And by the way, the computer that I'm actually using right now is one of these ultra small desktops made by Dell. It is a model 745, but it's the real tiny small form factor that has no way to expand it with PCI cards. I would stay away from these unless you are sure that your customers never want to expand or improve the computer experience. No expansion slots.
However, the medium-size Dell computer case is perfectly fine. It requires half height cards, but there's no problem finding half I cards nowadays. Typically the medium-size case has at least one slot that suitable for a dedicated graphics card plus the other PCI slots for the more ordinary things.

Years ago I studied real hard to become a TV repair technician. I worked at that for a while and I would study at home to learn computer programming. Months later I did travel back to California and got a job in Silicon Valley during those years when the personal computer industry was booming in that area. So I was able to use my background in electronic technology to get a decent job there in the Valley during the time when there was a lot of interest in personal computing and manufacturing stuff for use in personal computers.
Of course, nowadays most of the actual manufacturing is done elsewhere and the Silicon Valley nowadays is mostly a place for start up companies and for firms that are doing deep research into new ideas. Anyway, I am too old for any of that now.
Just thought I would share some of these ideas with you.

End of dictation. 

[patio]

Thanx to Win 10 i'm actually up from this point last 2 years...

[Salmon Trout]

I used to be a TV repair man in the 1970s and early 80s. It started when I was about 14, being interested in electronics, I used to be given stuff that people didn't want, radios, record players, TVs, etc. Mostly vacuum tubes then, even in the earlier 80s a lot of colour TVs that were in use by customers had them. I went from fixing stuff at home for people, mainly for beer money, to working in a repair workshop for a company that rented out TVs. It was a culture shock. No more studying the circuit diagram and trying to work out the fault scientifically. There wasn't time for that. The firm had a range of 5 or 6 sets out on rental, and they were all by the same manufacturer. You would get a set in with reduced picture height, and old Jack would say "change V14, and if that doesn't fix it, change R251, it's gone high". You had lists of stock faults, and really, a monkey could have done the job, as long as it could use a soldering iron. A lot of problems were really due to reliability issues.

[DaveLembke]

   Yeah I remember TV Repair Techs on call and some shops here and there that serviced TV's and Vacuum cleaners etc in Northern New Jersey where I grew up 15 minutes from NYC. In the 1970s and early 1980s they thrived. I remember going into them to get vacuum cleaner belts for my mom when she would get something snagged in the auger and burn up the belt. This one guy in view behind counter had a TV open and while smoking a cigar off and on be soldering something with one of those old black sears craftsman soldering iron guns that had the light that came on with 1/2 trigger and loop of metal that heated at the tip when full trigger pulled. By about 1989 most of them went out of business.

   Next door neighbor was a TV repair man since the 1950s and I use to invite myself as little kids do into his garage when he was working in it to see what he was up to and he had old tube TV's and Radios that he worked on. The glow of the tubes and him working on it to me was mesmerizing. It felt like I had a mad scientist working in his shop right next door to my home and Mr Delner was really cool that he wasnt mean and telling me to go back home, he let me stick around and watch what he was doing even though I had absolutely no clue what he was doing but it was entertaining since I wanted to know how it worked and how he knew what was what. When he passed away in 1983. His wife was in her late 70s and the stuff in the garage was no longer touched. It was his clutter that no one else in the family knew what to do with. I use to sneak into their garage that was offset along side my property which had a side door that wasnt locked and go in there quietly and snoop around and check out what stuff he had in there. He had all sorts of books and manuals and tubes and large metal block capacitors and resistors and all. I was about 10 years old and "borrowed" stuff from their garage without asking. I figured that well he is dead and no one else is using this stuff and he probably would be ok with me messing with his stuff since he is gone and cant use it anymore. That was my mindset at age 10. Of what I "borrowed" from his garage, I couldnt make any of the circuits do much other than I learned that the tubes with a 6 in their part number would glow with a 6 volt lantern battery. I would trial and error testing what pins on the tube were the power pins, and when i found the power pins for the element inside it would glow orange.

   I brought this to school for show and tell and the teacher and classmates were like WOW COOOL, what does it do... and I said it only does as you see, it glows orange. Then they were like ohhhh... Thats boring then.  Teachers though knowing my interest in electronics would bring in broken things for me to see if I can fix them. Most stuff I couldnt but a few things I was able to fix. I fixed a toaster and an electric pencil sharpener. The toaster had a break in the element that glowed orange. I fixed that by fixing the mechanical switch inside that wasnt making contact when lever pushed down, and the electric pencil sharpener was somehow a pencil point made its way into the motor and gearbox section and was pinched between the motor sprocket and the sharpener sprocket mechanically binding it. I just needed to turn the sprocket like counter clockwise to free the piece of graphite and then the sprocket teeth meshed without binding. The teachers were very thankful for this and so both teachers were cool and extended my help into everyone benefitting such as thanks to Dave fixing the pencil sharpener I will bring in cookies for everyone tomorrow etc. Only draw back to this was that each time a teacher brought in something to be fixed I now had people saying Fix it so we can get the treat reward. There was a TV brought in in 5th grade and this teacher heard about me from prior grade teachers and she opened her mouth and said well if Dave fixes this TV then I promise to the class that we will watch the next New York Mets game that is on during the day on it. I looked at the teacher like... GREATTTT. Thank You for putting me on the spot here. Fixing a TV is a bit more challenging than a Toaster and electric pencil sharpener. Well kids in class were like can you fix it, and I opened it up and the circuit board was smoked around the high voltage for the electron gun and the picture with brightness control all the way up in a dark room you could barely see a picture and it didnt fit to the entire picture tube. I said this cant be fixed by me. It needs a new circuit board and I knew at that time that the boards were model specific. One thing I was tempted to do, but realized that its just crazy nonsense was that I was going to take my 13" TV and move my working TV guts to her 13" TV's case and make it look like I fixed it. It would have been my TV basically in the case of her TV so to her and everyone else it would look like I fixed it. But I didnt want to give away my TV set and have to rewire to the switches of the other TV to make it look legit. So I let the class down. We didnt get to watch the Mets and some classmates were angry with me. I really wish the teacher didnt put me on the spot like that. It would have been one thing to offer whatever reward after its fixed, but not a reward offered before fixing that would turn the class ugly on me when it wasnt able to be fixed.

Thinking back now, Im lucky that none of the capacitors hit me with a shock as for the old capacitors could hold a charge for a while. My dad saw a pile of parts I had in my room the one day and warned me that I could get a bad shock from them and to run a screw driver across them to made sure they are drained first before handling them. Sometimes one would spark from a stored charge. My dad just said dont kill yourself and I was free to do whatever as long as I didnt burn the house down doing whatever it was. I had lots of mishaps but never burned the house down. I would buy parts at radio shack to build circuits from books and kits and once I bought a package of small NEON bulbs for like 59 cents and held it and spread the legs out to go into an outlet and it exploded in my fingers and scared the **** out of me. I then learned how important that resistor in series with the Neon Bulb was on a 120VAC circuit. Adding resistor the Neon worked as it should when I was about 11 years old. Played with making stuff like wire wrapped around coat hangers to make an electromagnet, but it didnt work as intended because I failed to notice that the power supply that was 14 volts and 5 amps was AC and not DC. This instead caused a lot of RF Noise and upset my mother trying to watch TV downstairs because we didnt have cable TV we just had the VHF and UHF channels. Additionally my use of a DC motor and wire run through a coil made for RF Noise as well which also upset my mom trying to watch afternoon soaps.

Long story short... I bought kits and read lots of books and figured out ohms law etc and self taught myself analog electronics, and later in college learned digital electronics getting half a degree in microcomputer digital electronics.

Getting into Electronics out of High School I was very lucky in 1994 that a double date, the girls were friends and me and the guy named Earl didnt know each other and so I said so what do you do for work and he said he worked with electronics. i said ohhhh really? And next thing we knew we were talking more than the girls and drawing circuits on the napkins. I was then offered a job starting that Monday, went in and hired immediately. Was there until paychecks started to bounce and learned that when a paycheck bounces that banks dont go after your employer who is in the wrong for writing bad checks but that the bank wants you the stiffed employee to pay the bank back.  Left there to work at a bowling alley for a short stint to make ends meet as an assistant manager and then landed a job with Rockwell Automation in 1995 as an assembler. And in 1996 I was working on my home project at work and an engineer working on a prototype asked me what i was doing. I explained to him the circuit and he said why arent you an ET. I said well they only had assembly positions. He talked to my boss and I was moved up to production tester and light troubleshooting which was entry level ET. I then went over to help this woman named Carol with electronics in the service department wandering there on my own, and my boss saw me helping her and I fixed a problem with use of oscilloscope and prints and I had no clue he was looking over the wall of the cubicle. I was kind of startled when I heard my name called out where the hairs on my back stood on end for a second because I was where i wasnt really suppose to be. I was praised for helping which is cool and I was then awarded an ET position in service department fixing automation controls for Rockwell Automation / Allen -Bradley company in Lebanon, NH. This lasted until 2001 when they were downsizing and following 9/11 they chose to close down our plant completely and move the assembly and service to mexico and move engineering to other plants. Electronics was drying up. All of it was going outside the USA by just about all companies that were making electronic devices. In 2000 I was forced to leave electronics degree because local college did away with it saying there is no demand for it and there is more jobs in nursing, so how would you like to be a nurse. I said I like fixing electronics but not people. So I left that college and switched to a computer science degree MIS/IT which i took from 2000 to 2004 and completed that degree. In 2003 I was lucky to land a job in MIS/IT with a small local food store chain and did that for 6 years until economy tanked and sales dropped and they were forcing people out of the company by pressure tactics which they gave me threatening that I cost them too much and I would have to get a $5 an hour pay cut from $18 an hour to $13 an hour or firing people. I chose to leave on my own. And then got a great job with the USPS as an ET working with electronics and computers and automation. So I have strengths all around here that benefit me and the USPS.

While my job with the USPS is a great job. I have learned from my grandfather that its good to be good at a number of things instead of master of one thing and unable to do much of anything else, so because of that i try to take in and master everything i get to mess with, but with computers, mainly programming and taking on all languages that I can get exposed to, its made me a jack of all languages but a master of none.  So that is i can look at code and know what it is for the most part, but anyone looking at code I make might be like ... why are you doing it this way when there is a better way or point out other oddities in my code where its clearly not of professional coder quality and shows the gaps in skills with that language etc.

Getting back to Geeks idea of selling refurbs. My youngest brother was doing that for a few years buying up core i3 and i5 laptops and fixing them up and selling them, but even he has seen a decline in the need for a refurb computer to buy. He was making like $50 on each laptop and they were good solid laptops of the business class of laptops where they are good work horse computers meant to last vs cheap laptops of lesser quality. he too has said that he has seen his clients going for these low cost new computers instead of a refurb and with the Core i3's brand new in the $300 range its killed off his refurb sales and so he stopped buying them to fix and flip them because he now has 3 laptops that he cant sell at a profit and will have to sell at a loss after putting more RAM in them or new keyboard etc.

As far as buying and fixing for a profit there is some risk there, you could buy a brick of a computer and have to eat the cost or try to find a twin to it to mix and match guts to make a good computer to sell and maybe make a small profit.

Years ago I use to buy classic legacy mini battery operated hand held games up cheap that were dead. For example mini arcade Donkey Kong Jr. which ran on 4 x C batteries and lit up with colors on a VFD display and had button and joystick controls. I was at one point able to pick these up dead for under $20 and fix them cheaply and when fixed sell them for $75 or more. But then the supply of dead ones cheaply dried up. I only bought them if the VFD displays werent shattered. 99% of the time it was a problem with the controls or the batteries were left in the battery compartment and the acid ate away the wires or made for a poor connection. The boards with VFD attached to them were very reliable. I only had one Galaxian mini arcade that has scrambled brains and its the ROM chip corrupt somehow. Game starts and the score freaks out and collision detection is messed up. So it became a parts donor for another.

There is definitely money to be made on ebay if you find the right stuff to fix and flip. But there isnt a steady flow of it. Opportunities come and go and you either get in on it and make some money or no longer can go it because supply chain of stuff to fix dries up or you get too aggressive into it and dont realize that the door to opportunity shut and now, your going to take a loss on the products that were fixed that the demand dried up on.
 

[Salmon Trout]

Thinking back now, Im lucky that none of the capacitors hit me with a shock as for the old capacitors could hold a charge for a while. 

The electrolytic capacitors in electronic flash guns that photographers use can be very nasty. I burned half the tip off a screwdriver discharging one. Noise like a pistol shot. Used a probe with a resistor after that.  Also the CRT holds a charge - the glass of the tube has an interior and an exterior coating which together form the two plates of a capacitor which helps smooth the 25,000 volts EHT. My probe was a wooden stick and taped to one end was about an inch of thick stiff copper wire soldered via a 1 megohm resistor to a flexible insulated lead with a croc clip on the end. I would attach the croc clip to the chassis and then whip off the EHT connector cap and prod the copper tip into the socket on the CRT. I once got 300 V DC on the back of my hand because I brushed a live connection on a vertical PCB as I was adjusting a potentiometer deep in a working set. Too lazy to unhinge the chassis, done it plenty of times before, etc. The point I contacted was where a bad quality repair had been made (two resistors in series to replace one, with the solder at the join drawn to a sharp point). I whipped my hand out quick, and the sharp (live!) point cut a furrow in my hand as it went by. The mark is still there 30+ years later. Hurt like *censored*. The worst thing was the "live chassis" design that most TVs adopted to save on the weight and cost of transformers. One side of the house AC went to the metal chassis, which was the negative of the HT supply, and the other side went to a half wave rectifier or later some kind of thyristor setup. All the tube heaters were in series. This were fine and you had a neutral chassis if the plug was wired right (UK plugs are polarized) but later sets in the 80s used bridge rectifier schemes so that the chassis was always at half mains voltage whichever way around the plug was wired. Full voltage here is 240 V!. Best practice in a workshop was to feed the set through a 1:1 isolating transformer. Sometimes at the first try bringing the voltage up slowly with a variac to see what gives. I follow a Vintage TV forum where people discuss restoring old British TVs and other stuff.

http://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/index.php

[patio]

Great stories....

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for sharing the stories salmon.   

Also going to check out that link you shared. I had an old tube Norelco shortwave radio set until my wife deemed it a junky old radio and tossed it out on me without me knowing until i went to go use it and it was GONE . 

 I use to fix some tube radios and I fixed an old RCA for a guy and was talking about short wave radio with him and he said he didnt need two short wave radios and so he gave me the Norelco for free and it worked perfect after a few seconds for the tubes to warm up. Many fun nights slowly adjusting the band to see what far stretches across the earth I could listen to if the ionosphere was just right and it bounce and fade in and out. These days i just have a battery operated Radio Shack brand AM/FM/Weather/Shortwave. But I still miss that old baby blue and white plastic body with metal chassis tube set. I'd love to get another like it but havent located the model number yet for it and it might cost me a mint to get an exact model of it. What caught my attention with it was Norelco which makes shavers. I never knew they made radios way back.

Here is a similar radio to the one I had, but mine was a Norelco and in the back it said made in Holland. This is a different brand but very similar style here: http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/rincan_unknown_all_wave_super_het_2_hifi_speaker.html