For those of you who may not know me, my name is Curt Dunn, a 27 year resident of the Dunkirk/Fredonia area. This whole thing started as a hobby in the 80's, from there developed into servicing systems part time for others, to a full time business in 2001, serving all of Northern Chautauqua County.
CDS consists of myself and one part time consulting assistant. It is a home based business, to keep costs down and passing the savings on to the customer. I am also a member of an online group of close to 4000 independent consultants and technicians, where we team up to solve even the most complex problems, and to keep up on the new ones that surface everyday. The key to solving, say a new spyware or virus, or perhaps a hardware problem, is knowing how to correctly word what is actually going on. There is no "one fix" for any particular area, whether it be hardware or software.
I am asked all the time where I went to school for this or how did I learn that ? Well, to be honest, I did take a couple courses back in the early days, but didn't find them beneficial. What I did find is they show you how things should work, which they rarely do in the beginning. I think sitting in a classroom will narrow your focus when troubleshooting or setting something up in the real world. A solution could be staring you right in the face and you will overlook it because it wasn't covered in school. As a result I feel my 20 plus years experience in this field is the best schooling I could have gotten. And with new viruses, spyware, software and hardware coming out everyday, I am still learning.
The average workday is 10-12 hours, sometimes as many as 16 depending on how time critical a solution may be. If I am not on the road servicing customers or working on a system in my shop, my time is spent studying the newest evolutions in technology and their implementation.