Computer repairs in Dandenong

Dandenong is where we do the urgent security work

The mix here is different to the rest of our area. Dandenong and the suburbs around it have a dense concentration of small businesses — trades, importers, workshops, family-run retail — and a lot of them run their accounts on a single computer that has never been backed up. When something goes wrong on that machine it is not an inconvenience, it is the business.

The two calls we get most are ransomware and remote-access scams. Both are urgent, both are treatable, and both are far less catastrophic if you ring before doing anything else.

If you are on the phone to a "technician" right now

Hang up. Do not press a number to be transferred, do not let them read your address back to you as proof they are genuine, and do not stay on the line out of politeness. The remote-support software they ask you to install is legitimate software, which is exactly why your antivirus does not stop it.

1. Disconnect the internet at the router — pull the cable or switch off the Wi-Fi
2. Do not switch the computer off if you can avoid it; leave it as it is
3. If you gave card or bank details, ring your bank on the number printed on your card, not one they gave you
4. If you gave a password, change it from a different device — your phone is fine
5. Then ring us and we will check what was left behind

Ransomware, and what "paying" actually gets you

Ransomware encrypts your files and demands payment for the key. We do not recommend paying, and not for moral reasons — it is that a meaningful share of people who pay do not get working files back, and paying marks you as someone who pays.

What we do instead is contain it, work out how it got in, clean the machine properly, and recover what can be recovered. A clean-up runs $120–180. Whether your files come back depends entirely on one thing: whether a backup existed that the ransomware could not reach.

Why most backups fail at the moment they are needed

Almost every business we visit has "a backup". Usually it is an external drive left permanently plugged in, which ransomware encrypts along with everything else, or a sync folder that faithfully synchronised the encrypted versions over the good ones.

• A copy that is always connected is a copy that gets encrypted too
• Sync is not backup — it copies your mistakes as efficiently as your work
• A backup you have never restored from is a hope, not a plan

Setting up a backup that runs by itself and keeps versions you can go back to is $90–160, and it is the cheapest insurance in this business. We test a restore before we leave, because an untested backup is not one.

Older machines doing important jobs

A lot of Dandenong businesses run accounts or stock on a computer that is older than the business plan. That is fine — old hardware can be perfectly reliable — as long as somebody has thought about what happens when it stops. Usually nobody has.

We are happy to keep an older machine running rather than pushing a replacement. What we will insist on is that the data lives somewhere other than that one drive.

Where we cover

Dandenong, Dandenong North, Noble Park, Keysborough and Springvale, same price throughout with no call-out fee. Urgent business and security jobs get priority — ring rather than booking online if you are mid-incident.