Harold The Computer Guy

Harold himself, is a very pleasant man, however you don’t get him all of the time. He told me that the PC and laptop were from the factory and needed one repair made to them before I could take them home. That turned out to be an absolute lie. I had another company inspect the computer and he found history that proved that they weren’t new. They never correctly installed the printer/scanner/fax machine or explained to me how to use it. In addition, after I told Harold that I wasn’t happy and that the computers weren’t working for me, he told me to call and to schedule him to come out. Every time I called, he was not available and his wife, who answers the phone, was snippy with me. On another occasion, another employee yelled at me, which is inexcusable. I had to hire another company to fix their mistakes.

He was on time, professional, and nice while he was helping me. I would certainly recommend him to others.

Harold came to my house - so I didn't have to un-do my computer set-up and drag it to a repair shop. He spent the allotted 2 hours and resolved my problem. Very pleasant to work with.

Very friendly and prompt service. I would recommend

Harold was very knowledgeable and thorough. He answered all my questions and addressed every problem I was having with my computer system. He charges $69/hour. I had to pay $30 extra as I'm more than 20 miles from his office, but feel it was worth it to get someone good. Plus he came out on a snowy day and when he could not get his car up our driveway, he walked up our long steep driveway! He also provided useful suggestions for software and ongoing maintenance of my computer.

It went great.

Harold was great. He arrived on time, kept me informed, answered all my questions and fixed the problem. I would definately use him again. In fact, I have already recommended him to a friend.

Harold doesn't leave until the job is done and done well. I had 2 nasty Trojan viruses invading my desktop computer that needed complicated reformatting to repair. I also required his quick appearance at my house or I would be stuck with no computer. While he was here, he upgraded our RAM and video card, set up communications with 2 laptops to multiple printers, installed parent controls, and recommended then installed a great free virus program that would work best with my computer. While programs downloaded, Harold never wasted time and also installed Microsoft Office 2010 programs & set up a new office printer, making himself very useful for the per hour rate. It's not just what he does, but how he does it. He explained everything he was doing as I asked and was very personable. Many computer technicians would get frustrated with the constant questions, but he seemed to enjoy educating me on what he was doing. I've returned to him multiple times since and recommend him highly to others.

I used the services at Harold the Computer Guy and I was extremely pleased with their work, their professionalism, their timely response to my inquiry and how quickly did the work on my computer. I took my computer to them due to a virus and to have all of my data backed up on an external hard drive. I dropped off my computer during my lunch break and I had it back by the end of the day. I personally worked with Amy and she was AWESOME. She explained everything to me about what was going on and she even called to give me updates as things were progressing with my computer. Not only have I recommended them to several other people, but I also took a stack of business cards and placed them on the business center table at my apartment complex, so everyone would be aware of their services. I felt that the price was very reasonable, especially since the cost of the external hard drive is included in my final bill of $150.00. I would DEFINITELY use them again and recommend them to anyone.

Harold's service met all expectations. Laptop has never worked more efficiently or faster. He not only fixed the wireless connectivity issue but found other issues with the laptop as well and fixed those. I have had other PC and laptop repairs done in the past by other professionals, but would highly recommend Harold and will use his services again if necessary.

He was professional, quick and did everything he said he would do.

My computer would not boot from the hard drive. I called Harold and he picked up my desktop (tower) PC from my house. Harold diagnosed the problem as a virus in the boot sector. He was able to access the content of my hard drive from another computer and backed it up. He tried to repair the boot sector but was unsuccessful. He said the solution was to reformat the hard drive, and start from scratch. This worked, and Harold then transferred my data back to my hard drive and delivered the computer back to my house. While here, he took the time to reinstall some drivers and software. Shortly after he left, I started checking to ensure I had all my data, and discovered that there was a significant amount of data missing. I immediately called Harold and he came back to pick up the computer. It turned out that he had not backed up all my data before he reformatted the hard drive. He attempted to retrieve the lost data from the hard drive that had been reformatted and to which data had been written. In his efforts to restore the remainder of my data, he said the hard drive was running hot, and would likely fail soon. He replaced the hard drive, copied the available data to it, and returned the computer. He kept working on the original hard drive for a number of days before I took it back, for reason described below. During the two weeks Harold had my computer and/or hard drive, he was very busy. While I believe Harold tried his best to perform good service, I think his busyness might have contributed to lack of attention in ensuring that all my data had been backed up before he reformatted the hard drive. I simple phone call to me would have been warranted if there was any question at all what directories contained files. His busyness also resulted in his being inaccessible for long periods of time, and much of the work being done overnight and in between what must have been more important business. This is not to say that Harold didn't consider me to be important, but just that his work on my computer was a not a top priority during the time he had it. That's why I finally decided to take the hard drive back, and take it elsewhere. I was torn between an overall rating of C (because the data-recovery error was his, and because of his inaccessibility) and B (because he tried to fix his mistake). I realize that people make mistakes, but when they do, fixing them should be a high priority in terms of time and effort, and I feel this was not the case here. Thus, a C.

Great job and all was done very efficiently.

I am very happy with Harold's services . He is efficient, quick, knowledgeable and very reasonable.

My computer froze up. I called Harold on the weekend and he responded immediately. I explained my problem and he made an appointment to come to my house on Monday morning. He offered to come immediately if I had a dire need need for the computer, but I didn't. Before he got off the phone, he suggested something that I could try to see if it would resolve the problem. I tried it and it worked. When I called him back to cancel the appointment, he said that I did not owe him anything. I will be sending him a check anyway, because he spent time with me and solved my problem. The response time and results could not have been any better. Harold is easy to talk to for somebody as technically challenged as I am. The next time that I have a computer problem, I'm calling Harold.

We phoned Harold soon after the new computer arrived and he came over that afternoon. We told him that like most people, our main concern was getting all the files transferred; I was especially interested in the large amount of music files I had on an older version of iTunes. In order to be sure the music files would move correctly, he updated iTunes to the latest version before he began the transfer. He was then able to install one of the old hard drives into the new computer to make transferring files faster and easier. Once the files were transferred, he set up security, activated all our email addresses, and set up the printer to work with the new computer. We had a new back-up hard drive and he installed that. He also installed an inexpensive Belkin router that he'd brought and set up wi-fi for us. He checked everything to make sure it was working, told us about the key differences between Windows XP and Windows 7, and answered any other questions that we had. He also said that if the Belkin router didn't do the job, to let him know and he'd take it back. After a few days, we were experiencing delays in connecting with the internet. We called and Harold again came out right away. He rebooted the computer and the router and that seemed to make things improve. It was a quick trip and he did not charge for it. However, after several days the wi-fi continued to bog down. My husband decided that since the house is fairly large, we probably needed a more powerful router. He bought one and we called Harold to set it up. He came, switched out the router and got everything set up again. He also got the old computer put back together and set up in the basement so we now have a usable second computer. Not only that, he took the Belkin back and said since he had that router back and could use it elsewhere, he would not charge for that trip either. Harold is professional, personable, and knows both computer hardware and software. It was a pleasure doing business with him and he is now our go-to guy for any computer issues.

Harold is extremely knowledgeable and a great guy to work with. He is very thorough while doing the necessary work and patiently explains all the tasks that he is performing. He ran a more thorough virus/malware scan and determined that my computer was not infected. Since I was not happy with the current virus scan software that I was using he recommended another one (which is working much better for me). To help with the slow response time he installed additional memory and deselected a few startup applications that were not necessary for my purposes. He installed Google Chrome for me; also downloaded the latest updates to ITUNES and Quicktime player which were failing for some reason when I would do it. He showed me how to put the automatic backups on a flash drive.

Called on a Friday afternoon needing someone to come to our house and get our wireless router to work (iphones, laptops, ipad, xbox, kindles could not connect to wifi). Talked to Harold's wife, Amy, amd she said he could be there on Saturday morning (no additional charge for weekend hours). He showed up promptly. Looked at our router and thought he could fix the router with a firmware update. As he was working his way through the various updates, the router died. I was pretty sure the router was dying before Harold got there - he did not kill the router. He had brought along a large variety of routers (just in case) and I picked the one I thought was the best fit for our usage and he installed it. He worked through the system making sure all wireless devices could connect to the WiFi and made sure our Xbox in the basement/man cave could get a solid signal. He also made sure both printers were working and cleaned up all the other printer listings on our computer that were no longer in existence. All the devices in our house are working properly for the first time in months - I am a happy customer. He was here for 3 1/2 hours. It would have taken my husband and son 3 days to accomplish everything Harold did in a morning.

It was an excellent experience. He called us back the same day we contacted him and he came out to our home the next day. He spent about an hour with us, both cleaning up our existing computer and helping us buy a new computer over the internet. Versus what we had originally planned to purchase he helped us save considerable monies by checking a number of discount sites, by advising us to keep using some of our current equipment and by telling us that the Company we work for offered a discount software plan. We called him the day after the new computer arrived and two days later he took another hour to migrate our old computer to the new computer. About a week later he gave us 30 minutes on the phone to fix some of the items we had messed up as we used the new computer. Harold was a pleasure to work with. In my case I have a lmited knowledge of computers and he was both patient with my questions but also did not go into additional detail I didn't need. I will use Harold again and recommend to others.

He taught us as and he was extremely patient and thorough. The computer was running slow so he added some memory to it that we had on hand and didn’t know how to put on. He did a lot for us. I think he charges about $60 an hour and he came down and sat with us and did all that was required. He actually came earlier than the time he said he would be here.

As a fairly advanced computer user who spends a great deal of time exploring the far corners of the internet I'm familiar with a lot of the do's and dont's of online clickerey. Nevertheless I occasionally encounter nasty malware or adware issues that subvert the usual anti-virus programs and make themselves at home on my machine. Usually this involves a lot of safe-mode start-ups and following assorted advice from random strangers on the internet and a weekend of pounding on my desk until I finally root it out. Two weeks ago I encountered a Google re-direct virus that was sending every-other search result in any search engine to assorted sketchy ad sites. After spending a Sunday at war with the hapili trojan and failing to root it out I had resigned myself to the idea that I was going to have to call some help-desk in India for some $99 tech support that was sure to take days to complete. Angie's list directed me to Harold. My calls were returned within a reasonable amount of time and the in-home service was scheduled for the next day. Harold told me that he should be able to fix my issue in an hour or two but if the machine had a rootkit virus that couldn't be ripped-out by the roots then the machine would require a reformatting. Given that the machine is a $3,000 high-end Alienware gaming rig with 12 MB of RAM,12 processors, and two high-end video cards this was not an exciting prospect. Harold arrived promptly and quickly deduced that I had in-fact killed the trojan but had not thoroughly cleaned-up the remnants (including a plug-in for Firefox that it had apparently added for itself). This was allowing the malware to revive itself whenever I tried to do a system re-start. Harold sifted-around in all the spots I'd missed and rooted-out the remaining pieces of the invader and got me back up and running without having to resort to any extreme measures. He made sure to re-boot the machine several times to check that the infection was gone for good. Harold is quite personable and during the course of the work he was happy to let me pick his brain about assorted computer repair related topics. Just what I picked-up from talking to him was worth what I paid for the servicing. I felt I got more than I paid for and ended up paying him more than he asked for. I work as a motor vehicle damage appraiser for an insurer and, like Harold, do a lot of house-calls to deal with highly-stressed individuals dealing with unanticipated damage to their expensive/complicated personal property. Harold is the sort of person who fits the mold for the type of vendor you'll feel comfortable with in your home working on your "electronic child". I'll be calling him back in the future for any other virus, networking, or repair issues that are beyond my level of expertise.

He was prompt and got the job done. He said if I had any question to call back. i did and he told me what to do on the phone.

I'm satisfied with the job that he did. He was prompt and responsive with my needs.

See above; very happy!Will use this provider again; much better than Geek Squad (took too much time to talk toa real person!)

Harold arrived on time and after introductions went right to the lap top. He asked questions to determine what the issues were. Soon he was sitting in front of a frozen screen. Sometimes he chatted with us about what he was doing, other times he was clicking away trying to resolve the problem. When the problem was corrected and the lap top working properly, Harold showed us several ways to get to the same place and enouraged us to try different things. Harold felt that the virus protection installed was part of the problem so he changed that. Harold then went to the desk top. It has Cincinnati Bell and opens with Outlook Express on the screen. I was unable to receive one particular email and Harold went through several diagnostics to determine why. He gave me the option of talking with Cincinnati Bell myself or paying him to sit and wait for them to return the call. He told me he would explain everything I needed to say. Lucky for us, Harold was still here when Cin Bell called back. Harold went through all the hoops Cin Bell tried to diagnose the problem and then it became clear the issue was on the senders end. So I contacted the sender and then the sender's IT person and Harold emailed them about the problem and sent pertinent the information. The sender's IT resolved the problem and the next day all was working as it should. Harold set up a new email box and walked me through the set up should I ever need to do it again. He also got me back into my Cincinnati Bell account--which Cin Bell changed without telling anyone. Throughout the morning, Harold included us in the process even though we were just standing there. It did not bother him when we ask questions-- and ask the same question twice in a different way to understand things better. Harold called himself a computer geek-- but this computer geek as a great personality so he is wonderful to work with. I have already recommended him to a family member. I checked his web site before calling him and I found it very informative. I know I will use the new call in help service he is starting.