IT advice · United Kingdom
Twenty years of UK support calls come down to the same few dozen questions. This page answers them honestly — including the times the honest answer is "don't spend the money".
One or two computers, a printer that misbehaves, and no interest in becoming an expert.
A setup that has to be reliable on a Monday morning, on someone else's corporate VPN.
1–50 staff, no in-house IT, and a growing pile of things nobody owns.
Straight answers
Read them as they are. Nothing here is gated, and none of it is a lead-in to a quote.
Almost never. On any machine made after roughly 2015, slowness is caused by a mechanical hard drive, a full disk, too many startup programmes, or a background Windows Update still finishing. An SSD and a clean startup list typically restores 80% of the original speed for under £100. Replace the machine when the CPU genuinely can't keep up, not because Windows feels sluggish.
No. Microsoft never displays a phone number in a browser pop-up, and Defender never asks you to ring anyone. Close the browser with Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), do not call the number, and never let anyone you did not ring connect to your machine. If someone already has, disconnect the network and change your banking passwords from a different device.
For most home users, no. Microsoft Defender, kept updated, scores comparably to paid products in independent testing. What actually reduces risk is multi-factor authentication on your email, a password manager, and not running day-to-day as a local administrator. Paid suites make sense for small businesses that need central reporting.
Anything you would be upset to lose needs two copies in two places, one of them offline or in the cloud. For a home user that means OneDrive or iCloud plus an external drive you plug in monthly. For a business, daily automated backup with a monthly restore test — an untested backup is a guess, not a backup.
Work out the honest maths. An SSD plus RAM on a 2017–2020 laptop is usually £80–£150 and buys three more useful years. It is not worth it when the hinge or screen is broken, the battery is swollen, or the CPU is a low-end Celeron or Pentium. We will tell you which side of that line you are on before you spend anything.
That specific symptom is nearly always DNS, not the connection. Your device has an address on the local network but cannot translate website names into addresses. Switching the router to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 fixes it in most cases. If it comes back regularly, the router's own DNS relay is failing and the router needs replacing.
Order matters. Change the email password first from a device you trust, then turn on multi-factor authentication, then check the forwarding rules and the recovery address — attackers leave a hidden rule so they keep receiving your mail after you change the password. Only after that, change the passwords on anything that resets through that mailbox.
Around nine in ten jobs, yes. Anything that is software, settings, email, Windows, printing or accounts is done over a secure one-time remote session while you watch. Physical work — a failed drive, a broken screen, cabling a house for network points — needs an engineer in the room.
Go deeper
Why machines slow down, what actually fixes it, and when replacing is the honest answer.
Boot loops, black screens and repair loops — diagnosed in the right order, without a reinstall.
Dead spots, dropouts and the difference between a router problem and a line problem.
Outlook that stops receiving, mailboxes that fill up, and 365 tenants set up half-properly.
What UK households and small firms are actually targeted with, and the controls that stop it.
What is recoverable, what is not, and the one thing that ruins your chances.
We are not a reseller and we take no commission from hardware, broadband providers or software vendors. That matters because it changes the advice. A firm paid to sell you a new laptop rarely suggests a £60 drive upgrade; a firm paid to install security software rarely tells you the free one is fine.
We start with the lowest-cost change that resolves the cause, not the symptom.
Registry hacks and mystery utilities cause more damage than they cure. We use supported methods.
If a machine is not worth repairing, you get that in the first ten minutes, not after a bill.
You get plain-English notes on what was wrong and what changed, so the next person isn't guessing.
One of the least helpful error names Microsoft ships. It means an essential Windows process stopped, and there are three realistic causes. Here's how to tell them apart before reinstalling anything.
Battery life collapses for four distinct reasons and only one of them needs new hardware. Here's how to read the actual health figure and work out which one you have.
Changing the password first is not enough, and most people miss the step that actually matters. Here is the order a UK engineer works through, and why the hidden rule comes before everything else.
OneDrive fails quietly. Files look saved locally while nothing reaches the cloud. Here's how to confirm what's actually uploaded, and fix the four causes we see most.
Smart plugs, cameras and doorbells ship with default passwords. Here's how a UK engineer locks down a home network so they can't be used against you.
If a machine is showing a ransom note, the next 30 minutes matter. Here is the calm, correct order of operations — and what NOT to do.
Written by working engineers, not a marketing team. Everything below is what we actually configure for paying clients.
In-depth guideThe M365 setup we use for every new small business client — nothing skipped, nothing over-engineered.
Describe it in your own words and a senior UK engineer will read it and reply. We cover all 14 services remotely, right across the UK.