About Your Sterling Maintenance Plan

First of all, Thank You so much for your business and for taking advantage of our Sterling Maintenance Plan.

If you have any questions about the plan or need any help, give us a call or shoot us a text at 806 722 0770 or feel free to swing by the shop. On this page we’ve included some frequently asked questions, what your plan looks like on your computer, and how to get the most out of this service.

First off, let’s go over what we install on your computer.

Teamviewer

TeamViewer is our primary tool that allows us to help you with issues remotely. It will show up in your system tray, and in your programs list. When you need remote assistance, just give us a call, send an email or a text and we will contact you to get permission to remote into your machine. We also install a secondary remote program called Splashtop so that in the rare cases where we have issues with TeamViewer we can still provide you with the same fast service. No one but us has access to these remote tools. All of our remote support comes directly out of our shop, and we will never outsource this. If anyone else calls you asking for remote access, we highly suggest hanging up and calling our main number just to be safe.

Bitdefender and Webroot

Bitdefender and Webroot are our two primary Managed Antivirus programs. You will have one of them installed. Bitdefender is our Managed AV for PC users, and we use Webroot for our Mac Customers. Since this is Managed Antivirus, you don’t need to interact with these programs. We monitor and control the updates, scans, and get the scan results. We may call you from time to time to remote in and perform additional virus scans as needed.

It’s very important to NOT install additional Antivirus on your machine. You don’t need McAfee, Norton or anything else. If you think you need more security give us a shout. Additional Antivirus programs will make your computer run slower, cause all sorts of issues and will make both programs less effective at actually catching threats.


Backup Software

If you opted to go with the Sterling Pro Plan, you have Unlimited Managed Cloud Backup. This doesn’t show in the system tray, but will be listed in your programs as “Online Backup”. Again, no interaction is required on your part. We take care of it all for you! We managed the backup plan, schedule, and it will let us know if a backup fails so we can correct it immediately. If you ever need to restore a file or folder, just give us a call and we can restore the files right back onto your computer.

If you do not have the backup on your Plan, we highly recommend adding it, or setting up another backup. Computers die, hard drives fail, data gets lost and we do not want anyone to go through that. We can help set up any backup you would like, it doesn’t have to be ours!

System Tray Icon

In your system tray you should see our Sterling Computer Services logo. If you right click on this you will be presented with a variety of options. You can submit a help request form, which includes the ability to take a screenshot of your computer. This is extremely helpful if there is a specific error code or pop-up we need to see. There are also links to our facebook page where we post weekly Tech Tips and other useful information as well as our blog and a link to get you back to this page.



What you can do to help

There’s a few things you can do to help us keep your computer safe and running well.

 

  • We handle your windows updates and other software updates in the background. However, a lot of these updates don’t actually finish until the computer is restarted. Rebooting your computer at least once a week will help keep it safer as it will have the most up to date security patches directly from Microsoft. This is incredibly important. Rebooting your computer also helps it clear out a lot of junk that is building up in the memory. You may hear us ask “When is the last time you rebooted your computer?” occasionally, and it may seem like a lazy starting point for troubleshooting, but reboots can actually solve quite a few issues and is our first troubleshooting step for a reason.

    To make this easy, if a Windows Update has completed and the computer needs to reboot to finish it, you will see a pop-up to remind you. Save and close anything you need to, and click on Yes to reboot right then. Some updates can take a while, so if you are in the middle of something feel free to hit No and reboot at a more convenient time. This will pop up every so often to remind you. It’s mildly annoying but extremely critical to the safety of your machine.

  • I recommend turning sleep mode off in general, it causes too many problems, but it will be especially important for this. This allows us to make sure that all the updates have time to install, and you get a full Antivirus scan at least once a week. If you are on the Pro Plan, this is especially important to make sure the machine has time to finish it’s backup. If you need help making sure your sleep setting is off, let us know!

  • Some of our Maintenance Plan Customers don’t call us until a problem is so severe they can’t use their computer. We can handle a lot on the back end, but can’t see everything you see, so some problems we may not even know you are having. Don’t hesitate to get in touch and we can get remoted in to resolve your issue! Remember, it’s Unlimited Remote Support, feel free to abuse it! That’s part of what you’re paying for.

 

FAQs

  • Our Sterling Maintenance Plan includes a lot! You receive unlimited remote support from our local staff, all in-shop labor is covered, it provides you with Managed Antivirus, and reports back to us a large list of details about your computer like hard drive health, service status, processor and ram usage and more. We also manage software and Windows updates to keep your device secure. If you took advantage of the Pro Plan, you also have Unlimited Managed Cloud Backup.

  • I wish we could provide a service like that! While our Managed Antivirus, Cloud Backup, monitoring and maintenance can prevent a lot of problems, we can’t prevent every issue. The Maintenance Plan is here to make sure you have the support in place to take care of issues when they do come up in a fast and efficient manner for an affordable flat monthly rate.

  • -Hardware costs. If we need to replace or get a request to upgrade a physical component in the machine you will be invoiced for that after your approval.

    -Service Calls. If we need to come out to your location it will be billed at our normal rate.

    -Other Devices. The Maintenance Plan is billed per device. So any requests for work on other computers or devices like printers, routers, etc. will be billed separately.

    - Third Party Software. We will help how we can, and certainly have experience troubleshooting programs but there are far too many pieces of software for us to be experts in all of them. Some issues with Quickbooks, Office, or other third party programs aren’t covered under this plan and will be referred to that company’s technical support.

    - Items not covered in other tiers of the Plan. For instance If you are on the Basic Plan, you will not receive Cloud Backup.

  • Of course not! One of the great things about the plan is when you run into a small problem, you don’t have to save up a stack of them before finally deciding to get help. Give us a call and we can remote in and get it resolved!

  • Give us a call or shoot a text to 806 722 0770, use the contact form on our website or you can use the system tray icon to send a help request form!