[mothered]

What you pay for with 'computer technicians' is just some guy that really doesn't know much, but will run whatever program he finds on Google, and if that doesn't work, will say than you need to reformat and reinstall.

Spot on.

I brand these tech guys as "textbook computational users", whereby lateral thinking Isn't their forte. I've experienced It first-hand at work. When they upgraded all systems, they've forgotten the most simplistic of things, such as graphics drivers, printer configuration (networking), POP/IMAP & SMTP settings and more. We called them a few times until they finally got It right.