MJB Computer Support

I want to thank all my customers for the past 13 years, but it's finally time for me to close my IT business in pursuit of more viable work.

Inspired by the 2001 film 'Antitrust', I decided before leaving High school to pursue a career in IT. At the time, there was no programming apprenticeship courses in Northumberland, so I went into IT support. Working initially at Wansbeck District Council, then merging into Northumberland County Council, I learnt the basics of desktop computing, working on printers, servers and helpdesk applications.

Knowing my IT contract was coming to an end, I was the final candidate at an interview at The King Edward VI School in Morpeth, at age 17. The staff and students there were great, and I learnt to work on laptops, servers and networking.

Naturally, working in IT, you pick up IT customers outside of employment, and so I decided if I was going to pay taxes, I might as well advertise my IT work. In April 2011, I officially opened MJB Computer Support. After quitting my job at KEVI in November 2012, my IT customers substitued my other income for just under 13 years. My official invoice counter hit over 1200 seperate IT jobs working for people at home or their businesses. Desktop, laptop, printer and network repairs became the norm, working briefly on mobile phones and tablets.

After spending more than half my life in IT, it's time for me to more actively promote my Private Hire Taxi business. So for the foreseeable future, it's farewell and thank you for the support.

There's still 1 or 2 laptops around that still have a traditional hard drive. This customer has benefited by replacing his with a new solid state drive. The speed difference is huge!

A pain to do, but I've managed it! I've replaced the keyboard, palm rest, speakers and inbuilt mouse on this Acer laptop. Pretty much all of the main laptop components had to be removed and reinstalled onto the donor cover.

Callout Service Update:
While I can usually look at most computers or devices quickly when you drop them off, unfortunately callouts to your home are currently delayed. My main form of income is now taxi driving and this eats up a considerable amount of my time. Sorry for any delays to looking at your machines.

This is a 2017 Lenovo and the colours on the screen would occasionally fade. I ruled out that this was not a software issue, but a fault with the LCD screen. A tricky repair, but a new screen is now installed.

At MJB Computer Support, your data security is really important to me. That's why before any of your equipment is recycled, the data is either electronically or physically destroyed. The data on this tablet was stored on a small chip, soldered to the board. Can you identify which chip?

I don't usually work on Macs, but this I could do! This 2012 Macbook was running slow. Inbuilt Disk Utility failed to clone the old HDD to the new Samsung SSD, so I managed to find other software that could. The Mac is now running several times faster.

A lady was having issues printing via her Apple devices. I managed to resolve that issue and to connect her iPad to her new email address.

This laptop had only been used the once before it wouldn't switch on again. Amazon and Lenovo claimed the laptop was no longer under warranty, despite the fact that it was only purchased in May. After pointing out to Lenovo statutory law, and providing proof of purchase, the laptop was repaired by Lenovo and returned.

One of my customer's had several pop-ups in Edge when browsing the web and couldn't install McAfee in Windows 11 S mode. Both issues resolved!

That's another PC dropped off. Unfortunately, the Hard Drive was damaged too bad to recover any data from it. I'd always recommend backing up your data to an external hard drive or USB pen at least once a year. It's also good not to rely too heavily on hard drives or solid state drives older than 5 years old.

A customer bought a new laptop and wanted documents and passwords copied to it. I've synced everything he needed to the Cloud so that it's now available on his new laptop.

This is a job that I completed yesterday. The laptop needed rebuilt and for extra speed the HDD was replaced with a new, fast Samsung SSD.

It's good to see a laptop that I bought for a customer 5 years ago still in great working order. But to keep up with 2022 demand, I've upgraded the RAM from 4 to 8GB and replaced the Hard Disc Drive with a Solid State Drive. This will quite literally make it 6 times faster, in certain circumstances.

This Kindle Touch (4th Gen.) needed the software updated. After finding the latest version from Amazon, the update was copied to the Kindle and manually updated.