D&R Computers Blog

The fancy, amazing, and handsome D&R Computers blog. A thick skin may be required.

Monday January 30th, 2012

This blog update is dedicated to you, Mr. Radio Shack rage guy. Thank you for brightening our day, and giving us a good story to tell our friends. Who would have thought that not stocking some oddball adapter would be such a life threatening deal? In honor of you we will be ordering ONE adapter, and it will hold a special place in our hearts for the many years it will sit on our shelf gathering dust. *insert smiley face*

Tuesday January 17th, 2012

Uuhh, happy new year? I have been way too busy to think about updating the blog and website, and to get this update in is a stretch. Onsites, work in shop, new clients, larger inventory, things are crazy around here. Pretty excited about tax time though, it's hands down our craziest time of the year. Oh and fyi SW:TOR is owning me, level 45 Sith Marauder all up in yo face!

Tuesday December 2nd, 2011

Tis the season! Feels good to be in high demand, but it's taxing at the same time, especially when having just bought a new house AND having family over a few days later for Thanksgiving. It was a good time, but now we gotta hunker down and knock out all this service work and system builds. I find it pretty cool that we can still sell/build custom machines, beings that it's sort of a dying trend these days but that's the best part of running a tech shop. Sad to see it dwindle away, so many big box company systems run like crap out of their boxes with all of the bloatware and advertising they shove down our throats. Although a custom built machine is a little more expensive, you easily get more out of them from a performance/maintenance/repair/service perspective.

Tuesday November 8th, 2011

HARD DRIVE PRICES! UGH! What a terrible time to happen with the busy season coming in. Granted it would suck to be under water instead, but yeah hard drives have tripled in cost. This is causing a lot of extra work and time, not to mention potential lost sales. Ok so anyways Dungeon Defenders ROCKS my face right now, level 70 Squire, balanced stats, currently working on hard mode Summit solo. Dean just bought a GTX550 for his system, makes me want to replace my GTX260 but it's still rocking. Got Time Warner to set their crap SMC router up as a pass through so now I can finally forward ports and have control of my internal network. Nice huh? Business Class customers don't get access to their modem/router configurations for some reason. What's even more funny is that I pay MORE at my shop for a far worse connection than I do at home. 5mbps versus 20-22mbps? 768kbps up versus 1mbps up? For half the cost? Yeah, makes sense. Oh and before you say "business class gets more bandwidth though!" no we don't.

Thursday October 13th, 2011

Holy crap! Not sure what else to say, been very busy. Dean and I almost had to double team a group of onsites today but we worked it out at the last minute and rescheduled a couple for next week. The Zero Access rootkit is running rampant, cleaning 3 machines as I type this and have already done almost 10 in the last 7 days or so. The used equipment market keeps going strong, have a few nice laptops in stock now and about 6 towers. My free i5 laptop upgrade is rocking right along, burning myself out of Borderlands gear farming, about ready to hop over to something new. As expected, Rage for PC is terrible. Oh and to follow up on last week's wild customer experience, it appears that I'm not the only one that has had a "fond" encounter with them. Figures huh? I've been around quite awhile, I can see things from miles away. Peace.

Friday September 30th, 2011

Holy onsite work batman! After today is finished we will have done 11 onsite calls this week, which honestly is pretty normal for our strong seasons, but it feels good to be past the summer sluggishness and back into the game. The chilly weather kinda stinks but I welcome cheap electric bills, and being able to open the store up and let it air out is refreshing. I'm still playing Borderlands when I get the chance, but I feel it coming to an end soon, not much to do at the level cap aside from farming weapons, shields and mods. I might move on to Dead Island or Deus Ex 3 next, or maybe even Rage if it doesn't wind up being another braindead Id creation.

Monday September 19th, 2011

So after clearing everything in Mario Wii, complete with 5 sparkling stars, I am now digging into the SNES sequel to Mario World, Yoshi's Island. A pretty off beat Mario game, but it's been a blast so far. I never got a chance to play it when I was younger since it was a real late release for the SNES and all. Anyways, I'm getting ready to blast down my second cup of coffee to get through all of this service work, and then some book work afterwards. Enjoy.

Wednesday September 7th, 2011

Somebody knocked their nice Gateway all in one touch screen system off of a table! It has a busted bezel and luckily still boots up fine, but still, ouch! Anyways, I just finished revising company return policy details, and fleshing out a better warranty system. We have some big changes coming this fall/winter with pricing models and such, so this is the beginning of that. Used equipment is selling like mad right now, this is such an unpredictable business to be in. One day we get 8 machines in to repair, the next we get one in but sell 4 used systems, yadda yadda. I'll take it how it comes though.

Monday August 22nd, 2011

Seems that the summer season is coming to a close, things have been really busy at the shop here in Defiance, and Napoleon continues to grow despite starting it at pretty much the worst time of year possible for a business like this. This bodes well for our strong seasons, fall, winter, and tax time are crazy busy for us! We started a customer loyalty program, which I think is going to really pay off down the road. All in all, things are good.

Thursday August 4th, 2011

We're cruising right along, both stores bringing in solid numbers. I'm torn between an identity of being a full blown computer nerd or a mild business man, I find myself doing equal amounts of work in both areas. Anyways, I installed the same type of SSD in my laptop (64gb Crucial M4) as I did in my new gaming tower and BLAM it's a whole new laptop! I am currently hooked on Borderlands, just finished my first play through with a Soldier last night. It's like a Diablo FPS, which I'm sure you all already know, since it's almost a 3 year old game now. What can I say, I don't get to keep up on gaming like I used to. Tooling with the idea of slapping some D&R magnet stickers on the Exploder, as nerdy as it'd be I think it'd be cool.

Wednesday July 13th, 2011

Broken laptop jacks, dead 1tb hard drives, typical virus infections, lots of cleaning around the shop, etc. Getting lots of use with the new rear parking spots, I need to find a couple signs for the back door and hang our banner sometime today. Oh and man do I dislike HP's tech support. Oh aaaand I called Time Warner over a week ago to increase our internet speed and haven't heard back yet. I actually want to give them MORE of my money, and they can't return a call? Good ol' Time Warner.

Friday July 1st, 2011

So I put together my new system, with a Crucial M4 64gb SSD SATA 6gb/s as the main drive and wow! Combined with an i5-2500k, 4gb ddr3 and my old trusy GTX 260 and we have a serious Minecrafting machine (lol), even with the LB 256x256 Photo realism texture pack it cracks 400fps consistently. Burst drive read rates of 480+ mbs, with average rates of 375mbs compared to a platter drive 7200rpm, SATA 6gb/s and 32mb cache hitting 163mbs burst and averaging 68mbs. Yadda yadda.

Tuesday June 28th, 2011

Been awhile since my last update, been working on LOTS of projects around the shop. We offer a bunch of new services, like a computer pickup/delivery service, where we come to the customer's home or business and gather their equipment and take it down to the nearest shop. We service it, and then take it back, pretty simple. Also we expanded parking at Defiance with two new spots out behind the building, designated by the D&R Customer Parking signs I just put up today. We're also running a service special for the summer months that cuts any on-location service charge in HALF. RAWR.

Tuesday June 7th, 2011

We've been busy! Napoleon is getting noisey, Defiance is keeping a good pace, and Time Warner is complete crap as usual. Took 5 attempts just now to get a 960kb file, and seeing 40% packet loss here in Napoleon. Two weeks ago we had serious issues in Defiance too, after being elevated 5 times on a support call they finally realized that it wasn't our equipment/configuration and sent a tech out. Tech shows up, and says it's just their service as a whole in the area. How about THAT! I could have told him that for the last 6 years that I've, and numerous friends, fought with their crap service! I even lose TV signal at home multiple times during the night, it either flat out goes dead, or flickers and distorts like..... satellite! Yes, a hard line service acts flakey like a satellite service. A+ job there fellas! UGH.

Tuesday May 24th, 2011

Been a VERY busy week here in Defiance! Service work has been in the double digits all week long. Aside from that, I have to keep up with day to day office work, faxing this, emailing that, calling those guys, etc. Napoleon is slowly picking up, not bad for zero advertisement, but things are set to get crazy real soon...

Tuesday May 17th, 2011

NAPOLEON IS ALIVE. I came over here this morning, and traded spots with Randy. Place is looking REAL nice, the sales counter is impressive, I want one in Defiance now. It reminds me of when we began Defiance, lots of gaps to fill with inventory, plenty of wall space, etc. But it's coming together very nice. I'm eager to get back to Defiance though, I have a lot of random things to do there. I killed our workhorse laser printer yesterday though. Go me!

Saturday May 14th, 2011

The Lilac festival is under way, and this is the first year that they've included 2nd street into the layout. Dan's got a table setup for his cell phone business, Dean's dodging traffic to get change for the box, and I'm doing what I do and trying to fix a slew of systems. Air conditioning is GREAT.

Wednesday May 11th, 2011

Well Napoleon is about set to open, looking like an end of week or start of next week thing. The Defiance store continues to stay hectic, lots of work to catch up on, along with a massive rearrangement and some spring cleaning.

Thursday April 28th, 2011

Did a few minor changes on the website early this morning, mostly grammar stuff. Think I may make a new home page logo too. Excited to start moving equipment into our Napoleon store this weekend too.

Wednesday April 27th, 2011

Yay, our first blog entry. I really have no idea what to put here. It's a crappy rainy day and we're sorta slow in shop here@defiance. I'm making the final touches to the new website and setting up this cool retro D&R blog page thing. I'm hungry.