64-year-old Eddie Liang peered over the top of his glasses at my laptop with the pink swirl design on the lid. I’d brought it to him because, although it still looked cool with its swirls and sleek black keyboard, functionally, it was a dog – and not the kind that would fetch. Instead, my laptop chased its tail, trapped in some endless maze of digital code, which locked me out of Microsoft Word (a death sentence for a writer), e-mail and even blocked me from getting so far as typing “virus” into a Google search.
“Oh, yes. Ransomware,” Liang said, examining the pop-up screens that promised to fix my system for a $65 fee – something that, for a moment, sounded tempting so I could get back to work.
“This one just came out about two days ago,” Liang explained.
Lucky me. Seems my wrong virtual turn on the web led me to a site (one of many, according to Liang) that downloaded the unwanted file onto my laptop. No virus protection software would have protected me, Liang explained, because I’d somehow given it permission to install. He said it is dubbed ransomware because a user’s system is held hostage until cash is forked over or, like I did, the machine is taken in for computer repair.
Liang worked on my machine while I waited, roughly 20 minutes total, for a charge of about $40. That’s Liang’s specialty: Computer repair, especially for small businesses. He charges about $65 an hour, though he doesn’t charge customers for a full hour if he can do the work in less time.
Liang opened his repair shop, Edex Systems, located at 111 W. 7th St. in Vancouver, about 18 years ago. The former nuclear engineer said he opened his small business because he wanted to keep living in Vancouver after losing his job when PG&E’s Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, in Rainier, Oregon, shut down in 1993.
Today, Liang smiles when he thinks to all of the changes he’s seen in nearly two decades of working on computers. After all, they used to cost about $3,000 each. He still builds and sells machines, the same number as he did when he started, but most sell for about $300 these days.
Liang, who plans to move his shop into a home office at the end of the year, works mostly with businesses that have five or less computers. While bells and whistles may reign supreme for home computer users – especially the gaming crowd – business needs, he said, are different.
“A business doesn’t need a fast machine,” Liang said. “It’s more important to have a reliable machine, not a fast machine.”
Until a system has been vetted for a year or two, Liang said he won’t recommend it for his commercial clients, who need functional systems to run their businesses. Even so, computers break and he estimates that he fixes about three each day.
Liang says he likes the lifestyle his business has given him: time to tinker and play with the things he loves, in a space that looks something like a museum to old-school equipment with Asian artwork dotting the walls.
“I just like to have my own toy store,” he said.
As for my machine: no more ransomware. And Microsoft Word, which I used to write this article, is working fine.
