Home PC Users

I feel sorry for home (private) users of PCs. They buy a machine that probably doesn't cost much more than any other commodity "white goods" item that they might purchase, but it often later proves to be a complete nightmare to run.

Their problems are partially rooted in economies of scale and also in holding unrealistic expectations of what they can or ought to do with a PC.

The economy of scale issue relates to the fact that so many PCs are made that they have become almost unbelievably cheap, while not becoming any easier to manage than the main frames of 30 years ago. The expectation is that something costing not much more than a washing machine should be equally robust and should cost as much to maintain as the similarly priced washing machine.

However, your modern PC is probably the most complicated item that most households buy and the skills needed to run a computer system haven't dropped anywhere near like the price has over the last 30 years. They remain very expensive to maintain, particularly with the ever growing threat of malware.

No doubt, the sales team at the local store will have helpfully pointed out all the wonderful things that the PC can do, but they rarely mention the skill levels needed to keep the product running, let alone the costs of those skills.

The second problem is that home users want to play with their toy. Their children will want to install the latest downloads, they will want whacky screensavers that add a bit of fun and they will expect cheap software to uninstall as well as it installed. Unfortunately, the latest downloads are probably virus ridden, the screensaver loaded with spyware and their expectations dashed regarding uninstalling software (even expensive software).

Furthermore, a lot of the software available at the cheaper end of the market is not particularly well-written and may well have a knock-on effect, causing other applications to fail.

The result is that almost every home PC I encounter is nothing short of a nightmare. At Revell Research Systems, it is our policy not to accept instructions from private clients, unless they are senior managers with our existing corporate clients, who know and trust our judgement.

Countless times, we simply end up having to advise home users that their machine is beyond economic repair (ie: they would be better off spending their money on a new machine than on us to repair what is probably already a fairly old PC).

Home users often think that an IT expert will be able to spend just 15 minutes to fix a machine because they will know just the right buttons to push. Unfortunately, this is often far from the truth. Often, the cause of their problems (be it a virus, spyware or their own ignorance) will have caused widespread damage in literally tens of thousands of places - in the registry, the filing system and other critical configuration files.

They almost undoubtedly won't have maintained documentation about changes that have been made and may well not have bought the necessary disks when buying the PC to even allow repair to start. If they did buy the disks, their significance may have been lost on them and they probably will have been lost. I have sometimes spent hours hunting for disks, which with the clock running, is often a significant percentage of the overall repair bill.

The alternative is to wipe and rebuild the machine, but then that means the loss of important documents and files. Home users often save files all over the place because dogmatic system administrators haven't dictated through security mechanisms where they must be saved. They very rarely backup, so the scope for data loss is huge.

In comparison, the machines we maintain for our clients are nearly always operational and rarely experience the problems that their users do at home. Why? Because almost all our clients' machines are locked down and we only load software that we have thoroughly tested beforehand. End-users at our client organisations simply are not allowed to install software.

Occasionally, some client staff members suggest we are being draconian when we recommend locking their machines down to allow only what is needed for the business. Our retort is that without such an approach, their employers are likely to see their maintenance costs rise by up to 300%!

We often benchmark new clients that are transitioning from a somewhat unruly environment to one that is tightly managed. We repeatedly observe that, after a period of heavy expenditure while they implement our suggestions, they experience a very significant drop in maintenance fees, typically by as much as 50%-67%.

In conclusion, home PC users need to be very careful what they do with their PCs if they want to avoid unexpected costs. They need to bear in mind that PCs remain very expensive tools to maintain even though they can now be brought very cheaply. Computers remain fragile and are easily damaged at the software level, with the damage often not manifesting itself for months after the event.