c. If your business grinds to a halt without it.
I gambled for a while and seemed to be losing. During the first year I spent perhaps $150 on replacing a printed circuit board in the Kaypro and $300 on printer repairs. Considering the Kaypro’s dramatic effect on my output, I won’t gripe too loudly. Nevertheless, I appreciated the need for a service contract for even a well-made computer in constant use. And within a few weeks it paid off. A disk drive failed, and the computer shop didn’t charge me a cent for several hundred dollars in repairs. The man worked while I waited at the public library down the street. The shop had promised, before I forked over my $250 yearly payment, that it would at least try to fix up my machine within twenty-four hours.
If possible, negotiate for financial penalties if repairmen don’t do their job—at your location or theirs—within a certain amount of time.
The contract might be with anyone from a national service organization to a good, honest man operating out of a garage who’s been in business a while and has convincing references—and substitutes for the times he’s on vacation. (See Chapter [8], “People,” for rules to consider in avoiding turkeys.) Count on spending 1–1½ percent per month of the hardware costs if you’re dealing with a national service organization.
Of course you might be better off without a service contract. Just make sure you can limp along briefly without a computer, which, alas, I can’t.
If you do try to wing it without a maintenance contract, you’d better be prepared to know as soon as possible if you’ve bought a lemon. That’s not such a bad idea even with a contract.
Theoretically, you should smell the juice within the first few months before the warranty expires. But that’s not how it always works—or doesn’t work. As a novice, you may not be putting the machine through all its paces. So why not invite a more advanced computer owner or a consultant—someone you trust—to tinker around with the computer in ways that you’ll eventually be doing? The sooner the “test drive,” the better. Your tester should do basics like copying disks, transferring electronic files from one disk to another, erasing files, and renaming files. See if there’s a program available to test the disk drives and related circuitry. Often those parts are the ones that fail first, since (a) the drives are mechanical as well as electronic and (b) they get some of the heaviest workouts during the computer’s operation. As soon as you get your machine, you might leave it running twenty-four hours a day for a week or two. Any component that will fail from heat buildup, for instance, will probably[probably] quit then—while your warranty is still fresh. Power consumption is typically no more than a light bulb’s.
Whether you have a maintenance contract or not, remember a basic rule:
It isn’t the shop’s diagnostic tests that count. It’s how your newly repaired machine will run your programs.
After I took my computer into a shop for disk-drive work, the repairman said the drives just needed a little cleaning and were now testing fine. The computer, however, flubbed when I tried one of my regular programs.