Yo how much do the computer companies on here charge for virus removal and windows reinstallation if necessary?!?!
Best Buy is $199 in store, $299 in home flat rate. Does not include data backup if it needs to be restored. (additional $99) LOLOL
I always charge like $50-100 depending on the person, amount of work and how much data they need saved.
yea i saw best buys rates, just curious what local businesses were.
+1.
I do about $20/hr ($40 if I have to travel far) and it usually takes 2-3hrs to get it cleaned, backed up, and reinstalled. I usually make $40 per call.
my computer is fine i was just curious because someone had recently asked me. What is everyone using to clean these days?!?!?! Good procedure to do it?
Depends on where you go. Places like best buy and some local places slave the drives and “clean scan” them. Which is why you may hear horror stories of people bring it to best buy or some other shops, being told they need to reformat the drive/backup data etc. because the software won’t detect or clean it properly
We do everything manually, its quicker, more thorough and 99% of the time keeps us from having to reinstall a windows installation, if we do we dont penalize the customer for it, simply because its a rare occurrence and its not that much work for us to just backup/wipe and restore
- ComboFix
- Spybot
- Msconfig (turn off anything unneeded and anything that looks fishy)
- CCleaner (PC and Registry)
- Defraggler
Most customers are very happy with PC performance at this point.
If it works at that point, cool. That’ll usually be about two hours right there.
ComboFix gets rid of some nasty stuff, although it didn’t help my company on Friday with that email virus.
SUck that you need to have logs iirc of everything you remove for the company.
WHat takes you two hours, takes me about 20 mins
Yeah, I just told the security guy where they are on the machine and told him to get them himself :rofl
It depends on the virus really…if it’s one of those AV2010 or something virus’…I know where those reside and remove it manually. I scan either way just to be sure.
The way I usually find them is task manager…see what looks weird…find that exe or whatever and then end task and delete the exe and start cleaning up traces.
Oh scanning afterwords is always a good idea, once the machine is “clean” i usualy run something to scan it anyways, once in awhile I’ll miss a registry entry etc…
Depending on the virus it takes anywheres from 10mins to maybe 30 to get rid of it manually. It requires keeping up on a lot of the diff types of files and locations they like to affect, but Its nice to get rid of it that quickly and spend more time on making sure it’s running correctly, and cleaned up so when the customer gets it back its like a brand new machine. and also much less prone to other virus attacks. A lot of good free alternate DNS services that block malicious websites
We are veryy thorough
some good info in here!
There isn’t much that I cant fix without restoring, the problem is how much time you spend on it vs. re-installing the OS. Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to spend more time cleaning it. When I worked @ Geek Squad, I hated charging customers for backups in these cases… so I didn’t. It saved me time, why would I charge more?
I just take my computer out back and put a slug through it. Normally gets rid of the virus
what is typically backed up in a reinstall scenario?
There are some cases where reinstalling makes more sense, although someties as long as the customer doesnt mind us keeping ot for a couple days we like to try and figure it out, so that way its much easier for us teh next time around
Geek squad unfortunately I don’t think you really get that luxary…
Favorites, Desktop Files and any pictures/music/documents in My Documents (as most users don’t save anything anywhere else). I’ll comb through the root of C for anything that stands out too.
Anything under All Users (in Documents and Settings) is usually a .lnk (link) file, so I typically don’t grab that stuff as the applications will have to be reinstalled anyway.
pretty much exactly what i had figured. thanks for the info.
We always gave the option first. The major problem was the amount of money they paid, and the 2-3 day turn time estimate they were given at check-in… and the 100 computer queue in the back room. I would expect fast service if I paid that much too.
Some programs (Quicken, Quickbooks, Kodak EasyShare, etc) use the All Users or Shared folder for their data. I always check it at the very least.
True…you obviously have to pick through the drive depending on the apps, but most of the stuff is in the users My Documents folder.