CBC News has an enlightening exposé on incompetency and corruption in major PC repair service providers. I not only invite you, but I strongly encourage you to take 15-20 minutes to watch it. Misdiagnoses, inflated prices, FUD, impropriety, questionable morals and lacking ethics seem to plague this service industry. As one of the good guys in the video states, “We’re going to wind up being hated like car salesmen.”

As my existing clients already know, PCIAM is all about great customer service. This means honesty, efficiency, integrity and fair pricing will always be delivered to you. You will receive top-of-the-line service from me or from someone hand-picked by me. Nothing, absolutely nothing, of the deplorable service seen in this video will be the experience of any PCIAM client. Your trust is invaluable and you deserve respect and gratitude for offering it. Thank you to my many existing clients for allowing me to serve you. To my future clients, thank you in advance!

(flickr upload by mpd)

As a friend and former coworker put it, I am on a quest for the Holy Grail of convertible-friendly, wireless mobile phone headsets. In my latest effort, I tried the brand spanking new, military noise-canceling technology using, can hardly find them anywhere ’cause they’re sold out Jawbone Bluetooth headset. Alas, it failed miserably. Oh, it’s definitely a great headset and does a wonderful job of eliminating ambient noise. It fails where all others fail: noise from wind across the mic. If you’re a convertible junky like me, you know of what I speak. If you’ve received a call from a convertible junky, you know of what I speak. C’mon folks! It’s time for a wireless headset for convertible drivers!

I have a wired headset by Etymotic that is the BEST solution for yapping with the top down. Though a bit pricey, it’s proved to be well worth it, for I can converse at speeds in the 50’s with the top and windows down and voice quality is great and I can hear the other party very well, too. At speeds of 65+, if I roll up the windows, the call quality is still very good. If you drive a convertible and need a good headset solution, try Etymotic’s ETY•COM headset.

Now, for mobile phone holders, there are TONS of options out there. The ProClip Mounting System is by far the best I have found. Again, it’s a pricey solution, but it’s well worth it - there is nothing I’ve found that comes close to being as solid and simple. I also like the one-handed friendliness, for I am often driving away and then remembering I need to pop the phone into the clip. Doing that and then inserting the headset jack while driving was not-so-smart, two-handed thing I did several times before getting my ProClip.

I use a RAZR phone and the battery life is deplorable. Since it charges via the same port that I have to use for the wired headset (great design Moto!), I can’t charge it while driving. I bought an Energizer phone charger last year and it has saved me several times. Get one; AA batteries are practically anywhere you go and you can carry your phone around while it’s being charged.

OK, now to niftycool FREE applications for your mobile phone:

• K7 is something I’ve used for several years now. Register with them and you’ll get a phone number that’s based on the west coast (so you might want to make sure you have long-distance in your calling plan) that is associated with your email address. Call the number and leave a message. Within seconds, the message is in your email inbox as a wav (audio) file attachment. I use the custom greeting feature and have nothing as the greeting. When I call the number, I hear the beep and leave the message. I use this to help me remember things later.
• Jott is the next step beyond K7. Like K7, you can leave yourself messages. You can also leave them for anyone else whose email address you’ve entered into your Jott address book. Also, instead of sending a wav file, Jott (using some mix of human and computer transcribers) sends an email with what you said as the text of the email. One thing I don’t like about Jott is it is not as fast as K7 - it takes some time for the transcription to occur and I’m sure that varies based on time of day.
• Pinger is like sending a text message to someone except it’s a voice message. Often (and especially while driving) I want to leave a message for a friend - a non-urgent, don’t need to converse, don’t want to engage in a full-fledged phone call type of message. When that’s the case, I use Pinger. I simply call Pinger and state who I want to message and then speak my message and hang up. If they’ve registered their phone with Pinger, they get a text message stating they have a Pinger message. All they have to do is open the text message and press send. Their phone dials into their account and automatically plays the message. If they want to reply, they just press 1, speak their message and hang up. Then the process repeats. If they don’t have their phone registered with Pinger, they receive an email that has a link to the message. They do not have to register or jump through any hoops to hear the message - big plus! Another big plus is I can message multiple recipients - so, one voice message to many friends with one simple service.
• Google 411 is fabulous! Add this phone number to your contacts: 800-466-4411. Dial it and follow the prompts. Super simple, very friendly and they’ll dial the number for you… for FREE!
• HouseFront is great for house hunters. Simply send a text message to 46873 that includes the house number, street name (rd, dr, ave is not necessary) and zip code. (Separate the street name and the zip with a comma. Also, instead of zip, you can send city and state. Separate them with a comma.) Within seconds you’ll get two text messages with lots of public domain info about the property. Zillow also offers this service, but HouseFront’s text messaging provides more information. However, Zillow is better online for this and more information about the property.
• Frucall is the latest I’ve discovered. Call or text the barcode number of a product and get the lowest prices at which said product can be obtained. And the prices include estimated shipping! (At least if you’ve registered…)

A client wanted me to reformat a laptop, but could not locate the recovery CDs for it. It’s a Fujitsu Lifebook S6231 that is a snappy small and light notebook PC. I have a Lifebook P2110 that’s my coffee shop laptop. I’ve been pleased with it and my client has been pleased with her Fujitsu. Calling Fujitsu’s customer service for her was my first interaction with them. I was pleased with how quickly I was speaking with a real person and even more pleased that the first person I spoke with was able to provide the service I needed. Super-impressed is what I was when the rep told me we’d have the recovery CDs in 24-48 hours… for FREE. I was pretty sure we’d be charged for them, considering a larger competitor charges to replace lost media.

No charge for the media? No shipping charge? Real person within a minute? Real help from that same person? EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE!

UPDATE January 17th, 2007:
In addition to the great customer service mentioned above, I have to tell of the wonderful lack of preinstalled crapware on the Fujitsu laptop after the restoration was run. I just booted a new PC from a major brand and removed no less than 19 (NINETEEN!) individual titles using Windows “Add/Remove Programs” control panel applet. NINETEEN!!! Ridiculous.

I just used CrossLoop today for the first time. A well-timed call from a client allowed me to test it in situ. Having used a variety of remote PC management applications, I was amazingly pleased with how simple it was to guide him through the simple setup and session initiation. Upon completing the session initialization, I was able to remotely manage Ronnie’s PC much like any other remote management application I’ve used. Of course, there is some latency between actions and viewing the results, but that’s pretty normal. The big deal with CrossLoop is twofold: (1) It’s free. (2) It’s simple. My experience today showed me it’s a wonderful tool for helping a client from off-site. While nothing is as good as being on location to help a client, this (coupled with a phone call during the session) is a great next-best-thing for assessing/addressing a minor issue. And it can save both time and money for my client.

If you need help, contact your technical resource and suggest using CrossLoop. If you’re the tech, it’s a super-simple way to see and manage the PC in need.

A couple of months ago, I found my way to Joe’s Goals, a simple, functional and visually pleasing goal tracking website. As I have used it, I’ve found that its greatest use for me is to keep up with contacting friends and acquaintances. One thing I know about me is that I think to contact someone who is not part of my daily life and then something distrac… LOOK! SOMETHING SHINY! Using Joe’s Goals as a little reminder that it’s been awhile since I spoke with so-and-so helps me keep the long times between chats much shorter.

Of course, I use it for general goals, too. Some of the things I track are:

• getting adequate sleep
• drinking water
• exercising
• saving money
• eating healthfully
• practicing guitar
• writing blog posts

Joe’s Goals allows for tracking positive and negative goals. I choose to track only positive things, for they are what I want to focus upon. For instance, instead of giving myself a negative mark when don’t exercise, I only give a positive mark when I do. That’s what works for me.

Joe also gives you an option to post a mini-chart of your weekly progress. Each goal can have a positive or negative value attributed to it and the chart marks your daily totals. I don’t use this feature, but I can see how it could be useful in keeping up on your goals.

Joe’s Goals is part of my daily routine. You’ll find it open on my PC almost anytime I’m online. Give it a try for a week or three and see if it fits you. Oh, and another nice little feature: the title of the site, once registered, changes to your name. So I have “Sam’s Goals” showing on my Firefox tab. (Of course, you still go to www.joesgoals.com to get there.)

Hey! Now I get to put a checkmark for posting to PCIAM! YAY!

Earlier this month, I purchased a one-year subscription to Carbonite, an online computer backup service. I don’t even recall how I found them, but I’m glad I did. I do take various measures to backup my data, but I had one backup item on my task list that sat there for months: off-site backup. Having backups readily available is a wonderful thing when a hard drive crashes or some other minor calamity happens. (Of course, minor calamities are major ones when you don’t have recent backups or don’t even have them at all!) Unfortunately, major calamities do happen. Houses burn. Tornadoes strike. Jack Bauers fail to diffuse EMP bombs. In short, it’s a good idea to have your data backed up far away from where the original data is.

Carbonite has a simple solution for this and at a great price. For $50 per year, you can backup as much data as you want to from a single PC. Once installed, simply tell Carbonite what folders to monitor and backup. Usually, “My Documents” is all that’s needed. Of course, there are other things to backup that can make disaster recovery easier, like your username folder in “Documents and Settings.” If you’re backing up a PC with multiple user logons, you’ll want to be sure to backup their data, too. Carbonite is selective in what it backs up, but you can configure it to backup specific file types and, using its context menu add-in, you can tell it to back up specific items by right-clicking on them and selecting “Back this up” from Carbonite’s menu.

I backed up about 20GB of data and it took a few days for it to completely backup my data. Now, it’s up-to-date and only backs up what’s new or changed. If I delete a file, it retains the backup of it for 30 days. I can restore individual items simply by using Windows Explorer to navigate Carbonite just as if it were another drive on my PC. Should disaster strike and I need to completely restore all of my data to my current PC or a new one, I simply Visit Carbonite’s website to download their software, install it and initiate a data restore.

The downside of the full data restore is having to wait for the data to download from Carbonite. They state the rate is about 8-9GB/day. Seeing as that’s the only downside I have found, it’s extremely tolerable by me. As long as I’m getting my data back, I can wait a few days. Still, one thing I’d like to see offered by Carbonite is to overnight a set of DVD’s with my backup files on them.

The link to Carbonite at the beginning of this post is an affiliate link. If you try Carbonite by entering your email address, choosing a password and downloading a free 15-day trial (No credit card or other sensitive information is required.), I will receive some money. I started writing this post because I want to share this great service. While writing it, I figured I’d see if an affiliate program was available and signed up. If you’d rather not try Carbonite through my affiliate link, then click here for the direct link to their site. I hope you’ll try this service or find another way to backup your data. Computers can be replaced. Applications can be replaced. Irreplaceable data… Well, you know.

If you’d rather not use an online backup service, burning your “My Documents” folder and other important files to CD or DVD and storing them at Granny’s house, at work or in a safe deposit box is a good way to implement off-site storage. The trick is to remember to regularly update those backups. With Carbonite, (ahem) “Set it and forget it.”