Choose the best IT help for your PC problems

BT Home IT Support
BT’s Home IT Support charges £9.78 per month for a remote access subscription with a three-month minimum contract, or £8.80 a month for a 12-month contract. Lines are open 8am-11pm every day. Its pay as you go option, where each incident is charged for separately, costs £25 and is limited to existing BT customers. Each £25 charge is limited to 45 minutes of support, so if you think you might need more than one 45 minute session then a three-month contract would be cheaper.

An in-home visit starts from £88, but if the technician stays for more than an hour additional charges apply. One such service is the Broadband Accelerator package, which promises to speed up your broadband by at least 0.5Mbits/sec or your money back. This involves a home visit by a technician who will rewire internal phone cables and optimise your PC for better broadband speeds.

Geek Squad
Geek Squad charges £6.99 a month for its full subscription package with a three-month minimum contract. The subscription includes free McAfee anti-virus software and 20GB of space for online backup. Non subscribers can pay £30 for one-off remote support. One £30 session can be used to set up a wireless network or a single hardware or software installation.

Home visits start from £99 but, unlike BT, there’s no fixed time limit on them. Geek Squad says it ‘won’t leave until the job is done to your complete satisfaction’. Home visits are also cheaper by a fifth for subscribers to the £6.99 remote support service. The Geek Squad’s home visits are limited to London, the South East, and the North West, but its subscription package is available to everyone.

Tech Guys
The Tech Guys charges a flat fee of £90 for various in-home services such as PC health checks and wireless network installation. It also offers a range of more expensive non-PC services such as flat screen TV and digital aerial installation. Employing the Tech Guys’ in-home service is a bit tricky as you must pay before you choose a date ­ at least two days in advance ­ for the visit.

The Tech Guys also offer a ‘Techfriend’ phone and remote access service. Unlike BT and Geek Squad, you pay £90 upfront for a year’s cover. Its trump card, however, is the services it offers in PC World shops. PC repair is £70, upgrade installation costs £30 and memory installation is £15. There are more options to choose from and all are cheaper than a home visit.

Go independent
Crossloop is a popular remote help service that allows experts to sell their own expertise online. To use it visit the website, pick an expert and load up Crossloop’s remote access software so the expert can get fixing. Crossloop’s best feature is the reputation system it uses. Like sellers on Ebay, every expert has a rating based on previous customers’ experiences. By choosing somebody with a high rating, you improve your chances of a good quality service. Different experts charge different prices, but a typical hourly rate is just $40 (around £29), which is a good price when you can choose exactly who to use.

How to pick one
Picking a service to use is made far easier if you know what you want done or roughly what might be wrong with your computer. Each service fixes slightly different problems. BT, for example, specialises in broadband problems while The Tech Guys are better suited to PC hardware problems.

If you’re suffering from a software problem and you can access the internet, remember that you might be able to benefit from the experience of others: if you’ve experienced an error, the chances are someone else has. Most problems are accompanied by errors, and a fix can often be found by searching for that exact error. Even if there’s no error message, try to search for the problem you are experiencing. You may find a solution you can use yourself ­ if not, the information you find may help a technician fix the problem faster.

If you do decide to use a call-out service to fix a problem or set up some equipment, remember to apply some basic safety rules. Only employ a company that you know and trust, and always ask for identification when the technician arrives. It’s also best to have two people at home when a technician comes to visit. Try to follow what the engineer does when they fix your problem. Make notes and don’t be afraid to ask exactly what they are doing ­ you might learn something that will allow you to fix future problems, for free, yourself.