STCServices

05/11/2025

Looking for a bodyshop to look after your fleet of vehicles?

Here at CRS, we have the facilities to offer complete accident repair services to your fleet. We can also provide refurbishment services for your vehicles prior to the end of their lease, so you are not left with an unexpected bill. We can help reduce your costs, delight your fleet drivers and help them maintain your customer commitments following an accident.

Contact the team today to find out more and discuss your requirements. ☎️ www.cosmeticrepair.co.uk/approvals/insurance-fleet

17/10/2025

It’s been a challenging week at STC, it all started off with a call on Monday morning just after 9am from a customer, “We’ve got a problem, we can’t access any of our files and nobody can work”
Their first thought was we’ve been hacked, the problem was the NAS box which is used for file storage had failed, all the lights on solid and not responding. Our priority was to get the data recovered from the backup onto a PC that would be a temporary fileshare. It takes time to recover over 750GB of data, but we got them back up and running as soon as we could.
So what went wrong? It’s easy to just buy a new NAS box, restore the data and carry on. But what would have been learnt? Could we have recovered the situation any quicker?
We found out that this brand of NAS suffered from a bug in the processor, Intel discovered this back in 2016 and made their customers aware of this issue, there is no permanent fix for the bug it’s just a matter of time before the processor fails. However a temporary fix was possible with a modification to the mainboard inside the NAS by soldering a 100ohm resistor across pins 1 and 8 of the LPC connector.
Although we had already recovered the customers data from backup, we wanted to find out if this was the reason the NAS had failed, otherwise there would have been no way of knowing what happened. After the modification the NAS box powered on fully and we could access all the data and were able to confirm to the customer it wasn’t down to any hack or ransomware.
Having a backup saved the day, I can’t stress enough, have multiple backup methods, Cloud / onsite using a couple of external drives and rotate them daily. More importantly TEST the backups don’t leave it to chance.

29/04/2025

A busy few days at STC, we have replaced batteries on 4 Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablet PC's, a fairly difficult and time consuming repair.

Refurbished 3 All-In-One computers, complete data destruction, re-install of Windows 11, tested and ready for sale.

Followed by a Motherboard repair for one of our Healthcare customers on a Dell Latitude E7450 which failed to power on, the light on the charger goes out as soon as it's plugged in, short circuit found, test ok and ready to be put back together.

Is it Friday yet?

28/03/2025

31/12/2024

Happy New Year to all our customers, best wishes for a great 2025.

04/10/2024

A couple of days away at the Brigantia partner conference in Twickenham. Some really good insights on what we can do to help protect our customers. As well as meeting lots of other MSP's from around the country, opportunities to work with each other and friendships made.

17/05/2024

Nice way to end the week.

We have just gained our Cyber Essentials Plus certification. As a business that provides IT support to our customers, it's really important to us that we also practice what we preach. Having an external assessor verify our systems and networks strengthens the trust and confidence our customers have in us.

If you would like to find out more about how we could help with Cyber Essentials please get in touch.

02/04/2024

Some good news on our return to work after the easter break. We are now Cyber Essentials Certified.

01/03/2024

We love jobs like these, getting the kit setup ready for installation onsite next week.

11/01/2024

https://www.instagram.com/p/C19C8o5NE7y/?igsh=MXE1bW9sZWluZjNweA==

12/12/2023

Data Recovery

At STC we provide a range of services and repairs, today we are working on a data recovery job.

The customer brought in an external hard drive that was no longer recognised by the computer and asked if we could recover the files.

When this happens, it can a number of reasons why the drive cannot be read, if the files are really important then this is best done by a Data Recovery Lab! The more the drive is messed with, the more damage could be done.

We know our limits and have basic recovery tools and advised customer of the risks.

In this case the drive was spinning up with no clicking, so we attempted recovery. The drive was removed from the case and connected to our recovery kit, initial signs were good and the drive was detected.

2 hours later, recovery to a new drive was completed, 100% successful with no data loss. I must stress this is not always the case. We were confident after initial checks to go ahead with the recovery, however, any slight doubt we would of recommended a specialist recovery lab.

12/12/2023

Challenge Accepted!

Printers are one the items that can be difficult to repair, especially as parts can be hard to source depending on the age of the printer.

This repair came in as it was displaying an error code, quite a common issue for this model of Epson WF7610 printer, we had to strip down the printer to access the control board for further checks.

In this case it's a blown fuse, caused by the part that the ink cartridges fit. This will probably mean the printer can't be repaired economically if the part can be obtained at all.

These type of printer are time consuming to work on and in most cases on the smaller inkjet printers you can buy a new one for less than the cost of repair.