So what is a "per service" fee you ask? Simply put, when you take your computer somewhere to have it fixed, they're going to charge you a bench diagnostic fee. This fee generally runs anwhere between $69-$99 depending on the size of the company you do business with. During this bench diagnostic time, a technician is going to run a series of tests to determine what the problem is and they're going to call you back.

What REALLY happens is this, you take your computer in because you can't seem to figure out why it's running slow, slow to boot, slow to open a program file, and slow to surf the internet. You pay the bench diagnostic fee up front. You leave and the store tech who's been trained to use the same programs I use everyday, for free mind you, scans your computer and takes a tally of the damage. Then they wait an hour or so and call you back.  "Mr.Smith, your computer is suffering from a massive infection of spyware/malware related to various websites that we found stored in your temporary internet files that were also infected or linked to the issue. We can remove and fix these problems for you for only $89 if you like, (Here's where it gets bad). You say yes and now you just paid an additional $89 for a store technician to do a little more than a few mouse clicks using FREE software from the internet and/or their company's "house copy" of paid software and rids your computer of all the bad stuff, something YOU yourself could very easily do at home, for FREE. Then the next call comes in, "Mr. Smith, would you like us to install and configure prevention software so this won't likely happen agains?" Sure you say yes, sounds like a great deal! (Really bad now). Now you just paid another $50-$80 for them to install free software on your computer and configure it. If you went to the "Black Tie" guys, you not only paid that much, BUT you also paid an additional cost of the software they were pushing at the time, which most likely was Webroot's Spysweeper with Antivirus and runs about $60.

Sooooooooooo, how's that wallet feeling right now? You're in for a $69 bench diagnostic fee, $89 removal fee, $65 to install and configure FREE software, or paid subscription software and whatever the cost of the paid subscription software was. Instead of doing it yourself in a matter of maybe an hour to an hour and a half, you felt more inclined to pay roughly $300 (tax on services included as well, can't forget that!) to someone else to clean your computer you only paid $450-$700 for. Moreover, if you don't keep up with the cleaning routine that someone else set up for you on your "newly cleaned" computer, you end up dumping the same amount if not more money into it in just a few short months. Not sure I see common sense there, but what I do see is a lack of education, and that's why this site is here, to educate.

Back to topic, for every cleaning step that the store technician performed, you got charged. You basically got charged so they could push a button a few times. This isn't like mechanic work, they actually work and get damn dirty. All the guy behind the bench did was click a button a few times, fixed your problem and charged you out the back end, how's that feel?

You can get the same quality of work from technicians/companies that charge a base hourly rate regardless of the service they provide. I strongly urge you to seek these people/places out instead of settling for "Per Service" fees.

I guess the reason this bothers me so much is because I used to be part of the "Per Service" fee places at one point or another. I felt bad charging a customer $129 to restore their computer when all they had to do was take it home, turn it on and press the F11 key to invoke the built in factory system restore feature, which was what they were basically paying $129 for me to do at the store. Almost every new computer on the market within the last 18 months has this feature or a similar feature.