Also, their spyware cleaning was not perfect. I installed Avast, Malwarebytes Antimalware, and ThreatFire3 – my usual home user kit of anti-malware programs – and scans found a number of left over spyware.

I forget what other problems he still had, but it took me several hours to get him back in good shape.

There’s just no substitute for on-site support in most cases. Remote support is useful mostly for guiding a client in the operation of his machine or fixing a problem in an application, not so much the OS, still less a hardware issue.

And if you pay iYogi $140 a year and only use them once or twice for minor issues, is that cheaper than paying a local tech guy $25-50/hour for, say, four hours when you really need him? By definition, the business model for iYogi assumes MOST clients will NOT call them during the year for more work than the client bill justified. Whereas the local tech guy bills for exactly what he does at the time.

I offer small business clients an “all you can eat” support service which includes unlimited telephone, remote AND on-site support for a mere $500/month. A lot of small businesses apparently aren’t willing to go that route, but in the end having a guy on site up to 20 hours a month or more to see what your machines and your people are doing is a good investment. Your alternative is to hire an IT guy for $50K a year or divert your office manager from their main duties to do it – which means it will either cost more or it won’t get done.

$140 a year – you get what you pay for.

Companies we deal with would loath services like above if they have no onsite support. We aim to gain high quality customers that are able to look after simple issues like plugging in a usb. Relationships are important!! We have about 4 techs for a group of sites all being onsite techs or in the workshop for major repairs.

I dont know about anyone else but I would hate some random looking after my PC at work.

We offer cheep services compared to others but you have to trade off if people require those services. The less they use them the better so you have time to manage them automaticaly via new scripts to automate tasks.

My guess though is that they are most appealing to micro-businesses, those with fewer than 5 computers and perhaps only 1. Those tend to be the clients with the tightest budgets, and the ones most prone to “DIY” solutions (for better or worse).

I don’t see them getting much traction in the more mainstream small business space, where things like relationship-building, on-site support, and the ability to go beyond just repair and maintenance into things like recommending and supporting “enhanced technologies” (VoIP, electronic document managemnet, SaaS solutions, Search Engine Marketing, etc) become important.

That’s why I think the future belongs to a company that can offer global support and economies of scale with local owners building relationships and providing the on-site solutions. (Not that I’m at all biased in this – since that’s what my company does).

Chip Reaves, Computer Troubleshooters

Many, possibly most, PC repair issues require on-site support. That’s a reality these services gloss over.

And $140 for “unlimited” PC support? Please. That’s as realistic – even if they are in India – as “unlimited” bandwidth and disk space for $10/month from your ISP.

Remote support has its uses, IF it’s backed up by techs who can go on site as needed.