His company, Systems Management Group, has a complex mix of customers: from private word-processors to embassies and blue-chip companies. He is a typical computer surgeon and I joined his small team for a day to find out just what does go wrong with computers and what he can do to save them.
09.05: A young man arrives, proudly brandishing a computer and two pieces of paper: “Look, I wrote these letters on my PC.”Nothing remarkable here – except that his machine’s monitor wasn’t working at the time.For the past two days he has been flying blind, typing on to a blank screen, carefully counting every keystroke. Steve sighs the patient sigh of the man who has seen everything: “If he had only brought us the monitor when it first broke down, we could have loaned him one while we fixed it.”09.30: Finish recovering data for an author whose hard disk got corrupted This is one of Steve’s specialities. Even with a disk that seems to have expired, he will try to get the mechanical parts moving (“a good knock often makes the older ones go again”), and then use investigative software to piece together the muddled contents for a tearful owner.10.45: Dash to an embassy in Belgravia to check on its computers Steve dons a tie.
No limousine, though – we get into a car littered with small pieces of communications cable, all neatly labelled “No Good”. Computers are carried on the back seat, never in the boot – you need to cushion the effects of bumps.We arrive at the embassy in the middle of a crisis about printing envelopes. After figuring out the word-processing software – which is all in the embassy’s native tongue – Steve detects a bug.13.15: Back in the cable car, heading for HQ, when there is a diversion. An accountant has called to report that her computer “simply isn’t working” We head straight there. It looks fatal: at the ripe old age of five, the machine seems to have lost its memory.
But on investigation, Steve finds the the culprit – a tiny and very old battery on the motherboard has run down and needs to be replaced.14.45: Over lunch, Steve recalls a recent mystery: a PC that restarted itself twice every hour. He spent a day and a half dismembering and analysing it but could find nothing wrong.When he returned it to the owner, he finally spotted the cause – an office ioniser, which had been very efficiently charging the computer with unwanted electricity.15.15: Head for an Irish travel agency to install PCs for its electronic reservations system. Within minutes, the first machine is linked to Ireland and we begin what the computer industry calls the “live test”: a customer has just walked in. He starts to haggle over prices.After a few minutes, the exasperated bookings clerk turns to his PC and says triumphantly: “I’m sorry, but as you can see, these are the prices in the system.” The customer pays up.17.10: Return to base in Battersea to join John Racoveanu, who is tackling repairs that have been brought in.
