Three stories that stayed with us.

What happened. Robert got a phone call from a "Microsoft technician" saying his PC was leaking his bank details onto "the Russian dark web." The technician convinced him to install remote software, then persuaded him to walk to CVS and buy $2,300 in Apple gift cards to "verify his identity."

His daughter noticed the software running in the taskbar during a video call and immediately booked a CleanPC session.

What we did. First we walked Robert through what had happened, in plain terms, without any "you should've known better." We removed the remote-access tool the scammers had installed, ran a full malware scan, and audited every startup entry.

We then helped him change 14 passwords, enable two-factor authentication on his email and bank, and freeze his credit at all three bureaus. We wrote up a report he could send to his bank's fraud department (they refunded $1,800 of the $2,300 within a week).

Finally, we set up a monthly "check-in" reminder — five minutes on the phone — so he'd have someone to run future weird calls by before doing anything.

Cost: Waived. We don't charge people who were just scammed.

What happened. Elena's five-year-old Windows laptop was taking 4+ minutes to boot, and her Wacom tablet had started skipping pen strokes — a client-facing disaster during a stretch of tight illustration deadlines.

She'd already spent 40 minutes on the phone with Wacom support, who told her the drivers "looked fine on their end" and suggested she reinstall Windows. She didn't have three days for that.

What we did. We ran diagnostics first: her disk had 88% used, 42 startup programs running, and three conflicting graphics driver versions from previous updates. We trimmed the startup list to the essentials, cleaned up 18 GB of temporary and cached files, and reinstalled a matched pair of GPU and Wacom drivers.

Elena watched every step. She now knew what her boot list looked like, what to delete when things got sluggish again, and how to check driver versions if the Wacom acted up.

Result: Boot time from 4m 20s to 22 seconds. Pen response instant. She finished her deadline that evening. Since then she's booked us twice more through her Home Office plan — once to migrate to a new machine, once for a Wi-Fi issue.

What happened. A Sunday afternoon call: the family desktop wouldn't boot, and the last backup was "probably a year ago, maybe more." On it: 12 years of birthday photos, video of their late father's 80th, the kids' baby pictures — none of it duplicated anywhere else.

Two other services had already told them it was hopeless and quoted $1,200+ for "data-recovery lab work" with no guarantee.

What we did. We booked an emergency session and started with a diagnostic — the drive had bad sectors but was still spinning, which meant we had a shot before it degraded further.

Rather than boot the OS (which would keep hammering the failing sectors), we used a live rescue environment to copy the family's Pictures, Videos, and Documents folders sector-by-sector to a fresh external drive Elena's brother lent us. Slow — six hours across two days, with breaks for the drive to cool down — but stable.

We recovered 2,398 of 2,400 photos and every single video. The two photos we lost were from 2011 and, according to Elena, "we probably have on Facebook anyway."

We then set them up with a $6/month cloud backup and showed them how to check it every quarter. This will never happen to them twice.