When you have your computer worked on by your trusted computer IT professional, treat that person like you would your own doctor.  Tell them everything – even the most minor of annoyances can be signs of something larger, and the more information you can give your person the better, and certainly don’t withhold information!

Trust me, if you’ve been to a naughty website and got infected by a nasty, don’t withhold that info out of embarrassment – we’re not here to judge you, we’re here to fix your computer, and we *need* to know these things.

Here’s an example of a job we had last week where the client withheld information from us, which ended up costing the client money; had he volunteered this information at the beginning the time it took to fix his problem would have been cut in half.

We’ll call the client ‘Joe’, and yes, names have been changed to protect the innocent.

So Joe calls us up and says that his mouse isn’t working.  He sees the cursor but try as he might the mouse won’t move.  He’s tried plugging in a different mouse from another system but has the same problem.  ‘Joe’, we asked, ‘has anything recently been installed, uninstalled or changed on your system?’  ‘Nope’ he said, ‘Mouse was working one day then stopped the next’.

We had a software program already installed on his system that allowed for remote access so we remoted into his system and found we had full control of the mouse cursor – yay!

We took a look and found that under Device Manager his mouse had an error that the driver couldn’t load.  We grabbed a backup copy of the mouse driver, replaced the ‘bad’ driver with the backup but still had the same issue.  No local mouse.

We tried doing a System Restore back to the day before but the restore failed, tried going back a week, restore failed.

Checked the log files, no standout errors other than the mouse driver not loading.

At this point we needed the system in our hands to further troubleshoot, and Joe had the system sent over to our shop.  We researched the error (Google for the win!) and found quite a few folks with the same issue with myriad ‘fixes’ which ranged from using a different mouse (nope) to installing a new driver (nope) to reinstalling Windows (not going there) but we found one person who had the same issue that was caused by a corrupt copy of a particular antivirus program that just so happened to be installed on Joe’s system.

We uninstalled his antivirus program and viola! His mouse was back and in action.

We called up Joe with the good news and after telling him about the antivirus program being the cause of the issue he proceeded to tell us about how the previous evening he had attempted to upgrade his virus program and it hung at 98% of the process and his machine locked up and rebooted itself, after which his mouse no longer functioned.

/facepalm

If Joe had only let us know up front about the antivirus program upgrade fail the evening before we could have had this fixed in a jiffy via a remote session.

PLEASE, tell us everything – we’re your PC doctors!

We welcome any feedback, and as always if you have any questions don’t hesitate to give us a shout!

Web www.scurlocksystems.com and www.ssaremote.com

Scurlock Systems and Associates LLC

866.665.1750 | 972.633.1111

Scurlock Systems is located in Plano, Texas and provides both remote computer service and computer repair in Plano, Dallas, Richardson, Allen and surrounding areas.