I wish I'd had the experience that the others' who posted here had. I had a phone consult with Ralph- admittedly, it's been quite some time. I don't doubt that he's a good computer guy, but it wasn't a good match for me.
The short version is that after I'd been talking to Ralph for a while, he said and I'm paraphrasing here- "well this is where I ask you for your credit card for my time- which is $100 for this hour". HUH? I absolutely, 100% expect to pay for any service I use, BUT: #1: At no time did he say we were "on the clock". I thought I called someone to ask questions and then if he did any work or provided any service or expertise, we would discuss his rate. But, realistically, only about half of it (and that's a very generous estimate) was specifically doing any kind of troubleshooting- but the rest of the conversation, he was telling me how it would be difficult to help me because he gets around on a bike and that he lives pretty far from the city and doesn't actually have a city office. I lived just south of the city at the time. His guess was that my hard drive was dead. One solution he had was for me to go to Costco and buy a computer, transfer all my stuff to that computer and then return it once I had replaced the hard drive on my own computer. What?!? Sorry- That's unethical. Can you imagine phoning your auto mechanic about a problem and he tells you to clean off the battery cable connections and that doesn't resolve the issue. Then he tells you to go to the store, buy a battery, hook it up, then bring the car to him to see what the problem was and then return the battery to the store. And, then he charges you $100 for that phone call. I was really caught off guard and should have stated my concerns. I did not and just gave him my credit card. I felt gouged. I should say that I found another computer consultant to help me. He came to my house, took my computer, installed a new hard drive, re-installed various utilities, did a bunch of other cleaning up, brought it back, set it up- answered several questions and the bill was $240.00 (a deal, I'd say!). He charges $160/hour and only charges for actual facetime, not when the computer is running scans, etc. A much better fit for my needs.
**I did receive a message from this business and I definitely had the experience I wrote about- so if his impression is that I'm not a client of his, then yes, after that I did not want to be a client of his. As I said above, I lived south of the city at the time of this phone transaction- so that is why he doesn't find a Calistoga client in his files. And, it was quite some time back and not in the last month, also as stated above. In any case, I don't want to re-hash this, so will leave it at that. I posted this honest review simply so that other Yelpers would have another person's experience. read more