A long computer cleanup session, incomplete as it is, yielded a possible business idea. The friend I was helping (he’s over 80) has a Windows PC with the usual encrustations of cruft and malware. AdAware found 213 things it felt didn’t like, and I would expect a lot more performance from a 2 GHz CPU. And of course backups are filed under good intentions, desired but undone. So it’s well and truly gummed up.
As we worked through the mess — no updates had been applied since April and the built-in firewall was turned off — it was suggested that there a lot of people in similar straits. At some point it was determined that the time zone issues were the result of a dead battery, so the battery was replaced, but installed backwards, so the clock never kept time between daily reboots. Entropy, the overwhelming amounts of crap applied when these machines are built, and Windows’ inconsistent user interface all conspire against even younger more supple minds: an octogenarian is at a disadvantage. If someone were to stop by regularly and a. decruft and otherwise clean up a system, and b. take a backup, either leaving it there or taking it offsite (or both), it could be a useful service.
The hard parts are knowing what to charge (by hour, flat rate, or a combination) and how to make a case for the service. I suspect a lot of folks could use it, but would they mistake this is a chance to get free training/instruction/application installs?
The backups could be burned to disk or if the details could be worked out, copied offsite programmatically. A big swath of disk at DreamHost or somewhere wouldn’t cost all that much. Yes, there are services like Mozy but people just don’t want to bother. Even making a simple backup — copy a folder to the CD and burn it — was foiled by the software’s inability to use multiple discs. Tell someone they need to figure out how to fit their backups into a 667 Mb container and they’ll just throw up their hands and say ‘to hell with it.’
This could be just the thing for a person of limited free time and a large but not infinite store of patience. Suggestions?