PC docs make house calls

Rick Hagen of Plymouth knew something was horribly wrong with his home PC when simple tasks such as booting up the machine or operating a word processor took forever.

The 51-year-old marketing-communications consultant summoned one of his in-house technical experts: his 17-year-old son, who is pretty handy with PCs.

But this problem stumped even the teen. So, on a hunch, Hagen checked into hiring a tech-support firm that makes house calls.

He had plenty of choices. The Twin Cities is crawling with companies big and small that will gladly drop in for a fee — $50 an hour and up — to dissect an ailing machine.

With a majority of U.S. households now sporting at least one computer — and some users coaxing multiple machines into talking with one another over wired or wireless connections — demand for expert help has exploded.

Local companies offering to help range from the Geek Squad, the famed Minneapolis firm now owned by Richfield-based electronics retailer Best Buy that deploys its "geekmobiles" nationwide, to smaller outfits such as St. Paul-based House Calls.

"Ninety percent of computer problems don't require a computer scientist," said House Calls founder and sole employee Michael Jurayj, a former United Airlines pilot who transformed his computing hobby into a home business.

But the fear of turning a minor computer problem into a meltdown sends clients Jurayj's way, and to scores of competitors.

Rick Hagen's problem turned out to be relatively major. He called the Edina office of CM IT Solutions, also known as Computer Moms, a franchise operation based in Austin, Texas, with more than 100 outlets — including a Duluth outpost — in about 30 states.

Hagen was desperate. Without the PC that serves as the nerve center for his home-based career, he's toast. So when a CM IT technician was unable to fully diagnose the problem on-site, Hagen let Stephen Preus, a onetime corporate co-worker who now runs the Edina franchise, take the PC home over a weekend.

The machine was a mess. Preus discovered that Hagen's hard drive had become polluted with viruses and other infestations that had crippled it. He got it running again and helped his client pick out a second internal hard drive to use alongside the original.

"He not only cleaned me up but gave me a lot of good advice on maintenance to keep me going in the future," said Hagen, who admits he's far from technically proficient. "I did the right thing in getting hold of a person like Steve."

Computer repair has inspired a number of wide-ranging enterprises similar to the Geek Squad and CM IT. Expetec Technology Services is one. Following a franchise model that launched McDonald's and Subway outlets across the country, Expetec has spread to 30 other states.

Expetec founder Lonnie Helgerson, a Minnesota native who oversees the franchise system out of Aberdeen, S.D., takes a Geek Squad-like approach of boasting it has "the coolest name" and "the coolest service truck" along with top-flight technical service.

Helgerson claims consumer and small-business demand for professional tech help is robust enough to support 52 Expetec franchisees in the Twin Cities alone, up from a single office in Eagan today.

Those living outside major metropolitan areas can contact Washington state-based GeeksOnTime, which claims to have most of the United States covered with a network of on-call techies who are said to respond within 24 hours.

For a virtual house call, Windows users can turn to companies such as Boston-based PlumChoice. Its tech-heads use Internet connections to troubleshoot PCs and their peripherals, such as printers or wireless-networking routers, from afar.

New clients are agape as they watch their machines seemingly repair themselves. Repeat customers just walk away from their PCs and let PlumChoice do its thing. (If this fails to fix a problem, PlumChoice uses GeeksOnTime as backup.)

Professionals tend to cost more than the computer-literate teenager down the street. A House Calls house call typically runs $50 an hour. But Jurayj usually won't charge for a five- to 10-minute phone consultation, often all that is required to fix a minor software or hardware problem.

"No one said I was a good businessman," he said. "I just fix computers."

For some home users, only badge-flashing members of the Geek Squad will do despite the firm's sometimes-steeper prices.

The firm has been concentrating its efforts on the home user since Best Buy bought it nearly two years ago, founder Robert Stephens said.

Once focused solely on the Twin Cities, the Geek Squad has piggybacked on Best Buy's superstore network in recent weeks to hasten a nationwide expansion. Stephens expects his geeks to be available in nearly four dozen U.S. markets by year's end. It had operated in six markets other than Minneapolis-St. Paul for a while.

A Geek Squad hierarchy is developing, Stephens said. At Best Buy service counters, visitors might find "counter intelligence agents" to help with such tasks as computer-memory upgrades. More adept "double agents" will split their time between stores and home-service calls. Geek Squad big guns, the "special agents," get to drive customized Volkswagen Beetles.

This staff structure means the Geek Squad is now able to hire people with less-than-superhuman computer skills who can aspire to geekmobile status "if they work hard and eat their vegetables," Stephens said.

Thanks to the Geek Squad's relationship with Best Buy, house calls have become somewhat more affordable. An on-site diagnosis will typically cost $149, down from $159, Stephens said. Reviving a crippled computer runs about $229, down from $249.

In-store help costs less. Even so, computer users may be glad to know they have more than one tech-help option if disaster strikes.