A little about my experience:

DCI Computers (my company) has been serving the greater New Orleans area since 1984. In the past DCI has had two different store fronts and up to eight employees. These days I no longer maintain that amount of over head, nor do I any longer sell custom built industry standard computers. I now concentrate on providing quality on-site support. I have an approximate 90% success rate on service I take on. Not all PCs are worth fixing due to their age, or the cost to repair being near what you could spend for a new PC, unless perhaps you include the cost and time to re-setup the new PC with your applications, peripherals and data.

For the past several years a large portion of my work has been configuring and migrating business servers to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The main advantages this offers is increased reliability and hardware performance elasticity to name just two.

I have a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Orleans, minor in Computer Science.  Should you desire more detail, or to get a better idea of my experience please visit DCI's Old large Web site  by clicking "Here" - but bear in mind the information you are looking at there is very out dated! Some dated details on me personally can be found here. I sold custom built clone/industry standard PCs back in 1984 and until Katrina in 2005. I have been building and supporting PCs on a full time basis since before there was a Dell line, back when ComputerLand was the only big local outlet, before Windows existed, long before Gateway and CompUSA came and went. These are just facts, hopefully not to be confused as bragging. These stores were all much more successful from a financial stand point than I. I just offer personal one on one local service.

Advice:

Tip #1: How to easily protect your PC's Software Setup and Data:  

Since no virus scanner really provides any decent protection; In my opinion the best method you can use to protection yourself from computer software related problems (which is the majority of the problems) is to create regular full image backups of each PC you own by using an imaging program like Acronis True Image or AOMEI Backupper Free, (or if you have the professional version of Windows you could use the built-in Windows backup program) and an external USB Hard Disk 2TB $70, to store your image backups.  Total cost under $100. I recommend the Acronis or Free AOMEI program over the Windows backup because they are easier and more capable. You could store backups of on average 30 basic computers on one 2 TB external hard disk.

The biggest problem with this is that you have to do the backup "BEFORE" you run into problems! Also note that such images can only be easily restored to the same computer or a very similar model PC.  After you have an image backup (which you can recreate should your software setup change significantly) then you just need to backup your data on occasion.

If you want to really play it safe you should have at least two external hard disks that you rotate on occasion so that one of your backups is not left connected to the computer which makes your backup susceptible to being damaged by some of the particularly bad viruses that are currently going around. Also if you can leave a secondary external hard disk connected than you can schedule full or incremental backups to run on a daily basis so that your current data is also backed up.

You could backup your data separately, but since data can be scattered in various places and since external hard drives are so inexpensive I suggest backing up the entire drive or drives that you use.

Since the majority of home users issues seem to be related to malware on their computer you should also download a free copy of MalwareBytes and ADWCleaner (from a "trustworthy" source such as Bleeping computer or MajorGeeks) and manually run it weekly or when you are experiencing issues.

Most people backup data to an online backup service or to an external hard disk, or if their data is less than say 64 GB they can use a USB memory stick (like this 64GB stick from Samsung that optionally connects to a keychain $21) and hopefully rotate among a few such sticks occasionally and keeping at least one off-site. Automating the backup procedure is essential in order to insure such back ups get done. I often use such tools as SyncBackSE. Configuring SyncBack may not for beginners. Another tool I highly recommend using on occasion is ERUNT (Emergency Recovery Utility) which basically allows you to maintain backups of the  Windows registry. Granted windows has a registry restore utility, but the Windows version often fails, so I prefer to have access to my own registry backups. Another tool and method that has allowed me to repair many messed up Window's setups (by allowing me to boot to a colletion of specialty diagnostic utilities stored on a  single USB stick) is a free utilities called Easy2Boot, but admittedly this is for advanced users only. All of these tools and methods you can find out more about by goggling them.

Location:

In general I do all service on-site at your location. I recently moved to Metairie and while I no longer have a formal store front some people are in no big hurry and prefer to save some money and drop off a computer for me to work on. I am located at 4620 Wilson Drive, Metairie, La 70003. If you do not live in the area I do provide remote support provided your issue seems to be just software related and your computer is working well enough to access the Internet and you are alright with me remotely accesssing it.