About PcFixin'

My name is Game Osborne, and I'm the person behind PcFixin'. Not a department, not a support queue — one guy who has been fixing other people's computers since 2006, first for expats in Tokyo who had nowhere else to turn, and now for homes and small businesses here in the US. If you've read how PcFixin' got started, you know the short version. This page is about how I actually work, and why there's a library of how-tos sitting on this site alongside the repair service.

How I work: I listen first

The single most useful habit I picked up in those early Tokyo house calls was slowing down and hearing the whole story before touching anything. Most people can't name what's wrong with their computer — that's not a failing, it's just that nobody taught them the vocabulary. What they can tell you is exactly what happened: what they clicked, what changed, what the screen said, when it started. That's the real diagnostic information, and it's usually buried in a sentence someone apologizes for before saying.

So I don't interrupt, and I don't lead with jargon. I ask what you were doing when it went wrong, I repeat it back to make sure I've got it, and then I explain what I think is happening in words you can repeat to someone else. If I'm not certain, I say so. A confident wrong answer costs you more than an honest "let me check that" — in my work and in the articles here.

What I actually get called for

Residential work is the bulk of it, and it looks like this: a computer that has slowed to a crawl and nobody knows why; a laptop that won't start, or starts to a screen full of warnings; a printer or scanner that worked for three years and quit; photos and documents that need rescuing off a dying drive; a new machine that needs everything moved over without losing anything; Wi-Fi that drops in the one room you actually use it; and the security calls — the pop-up that says you've been hacked, the email that looked real, the password that stopped working. A lot of that last category is really about reassurance: finding out whether anything actually happened, and then locking things down properly.

On the commercial side — small businesses, offices, and over the years a few embassies — it's the same skills at a different scale. Setting up and maintaining the handful of machines a small team runs on. Shared printers, shared files, and shared drives that everyone can reach and nobody can accidentally delete. Backups that actually restore, which I'd rather test with you than promise at you. Getting a new hire working on day one instead of day four. And the unglamorous, genuinely important work of making sure a business doesn't have one computer in the corner that everything depends on and nobody understands.

Software or hardware, old machine or brand new, I'd rather explain the fix than mystify it. If you want to know what I did, I'll tell you. If you want to be able to do it yourself next time, even better — that's the whole point of the next section.

Why this site has articles on it

Because most of the time, you don't need me. You need the one paragraph that nobody wrote.

There's a particular kind of computer problem that search engines are bad at: the one you can't phrase. You know something's wrong, you can describe it out loud to a friend in ten seconds, and yet there's no way to type it into a search box that returns anything useful. Or the search does return something — the same recycled advice on twenty sites, none of which works for your situation. PcFixin' aims squarely at those. The strange questions. The old hardware people still own and still use. The "it worked yesterday and I changed nothing" problems. The fix that everyone recommends and that doesn't work for you.

The other thing I want these articles to do is make you feel a little dangerous — in a good way. You've probably watched a coworker do something on a computer in two keystrokes that would have taken you six clicks and a hunt through a menu, and thought, how did they do that? Those moves aren't secret and they aren't hard. They just never get taught. When you pull one off for the first time, you get to stick your chest out a little. I like being the reason for that.

What to expect from a PcFixin' article

Plain English, and every term defined the first time it shows up. One action per step, so you never lose your place. An honest heads-up when a step depends on which version of Windows or macOS you're running, because it often does, and pretending otherwise is how people end up in the wrong menu convinced they broke something. A clear warning before anything that carries real risk, and a straight answer about whether you should attempt it at all. And a bottom line at the end, so you can tell in one sentence whether you got the win.

What you won't find: filler paragraphs before the actual instructions, steps I haven't verified, or the assumption that you should have known this already. Nobody is born knowing where the BIOS is.

If you'd rather I just handle it

That's a perfectly good answer too, and it's the other half of what PcFixin' does. Some problems aren't worth your Saturday, and some — anything with your data on the line — genuinely benefit from a second set of hands. Residential or commercial, near or remote, get in touch and tell me what's going on. Take your time explaining it. I'll listen to every word.