When is it a good idea to save money and do a Do It Yourself treadmill move?
When is it better to spend the money and have professionals do it?

This is such a great discussion topic for several reasons. Many peope are shocked when they get the price of a professional treadmill move. The shock is totally understandable, because it is an expensive job, often costing several hundreds of dollars. Let's first talk about that for a little bit. Why does it cost so much to have a treadmill professionally moved?

What's wrong with my Precor 9.33 Residential Treadmill, and how do we fix it?

A gentleman with a Precor 9.33 Treadmill at home recently contacted us with this question. His intitial contact said, paraphrasing, "I have a Precor Treadmill at home. It was working great. Now it stops after just a few minutes of operation. Error 27 is displayed when it stops. What is wrong with the treadmill and what will it take to fix it?"

This is such a great (and often mysterious) topic, that we wanted to publish it for all to read. Hopefully we can de-mystify the situation and take away a little frustration. Precor has some fantastic design engineers and they build fantastic treadmills and other fitness equipment. Sometimes service and repair information, for the average treadmill owner, can be a little, shall we say, challenging to find. Luckily, we are what you call professionals, and we have the answers.

Bottom line up front: Error code 27 means the drive motor has pulled maximum current - usually due to worn walking belt and deck. There are other situations where the drive motor will pull maximum current, such as when there is a drop in supply voltage. When the available voltage drops, the amp draw increases. The treadmill drive motor might also pull excessive current if it the maximum user weight is exceeded, or if a foreign object gets jammed somewhere and seizes the walking belt or rollers, or of the roller bearings are failing. In most cases, it means the walking belt and deck are well worn and need to be replaced. The very smart Precor engineers built in this safe guard to protect more sensitive electronics on the treadmill, such as the Power Control Module also called the lower control board or motor control board.

What does it take to fix it?
The walking belt and deck need to be replaced. While you are at it, the drive belt should be replaced. The deive belt probably needs to be replaced, but even if not needed immediately, you should do it. The reason is that the walking belt, deck, and drive belt are all wear items and all need to be replaced from time to time. If you replace the drive belt at the same time as your are replacing the walking belt and deck, then you will save a bunch of money on labor. If you only replace the treadmill walking belt and deck, and then 3 months later, decide to replace the drive belt, you'll be charged regular labor rates for the work. The cost of the drive belt part is pretty cheap, relatively.

How about the cost? At the time of this writing, the Precor 9.33 Treadmill walking belt is $297. The Deck is 295. The drive belt is $44. These figures do not include tax, shipping, or any handling charges.

A lot of folks balk at such a high repair bill. Our advice is that repair is generally always less expensive that replacement, so if the treadmill is otherwise in oretty good shape and is giving you the kind of workout that you want, then it makes financial sense to repair it. If, on the other hand, you are thinking about some other features or a bigger or faster, new treadmill, then this is a good time to buy one.

The deck on the Precor 9.33 treadmill is reversible. That means it is doublesided and can be flipped over, so that the othersise can be run on for a, hopefully, a couple years. If it has not yet been flipped, then we can repair it by just replacing the walking belt and the drive belt and flipping the deck.

Please check your service records and see if that deck has been flipped or not. That info will give us a pretty good idea of what we need to do to get it fixed.

       We thank Al Gore for inventing the internet just as much as the next folks do. It makes everything free and easy.  Gone are the days when we have to get up, get out of our jammies, shave, and actually leave the house to do.. ugh.. work. Now we can tele-commute and read Reddit all day from the comforts of our home office, instead of having to slog in to bogart the company's resources.  Kinda miss that K-cup coffee though....
       Of course these internet luxuries are also available to the thieves and hucksters of the world, so they can telecommute too. Unfortunately for hard working, busy business folks, the thieves are not spending all day on Reddit. Rather, the crooks are working diligently to develop ways to separate us from our hard won earnings, data, and reputations. 
      With Christmas and the holiday season right around the corner, if not here already, the crooks are working overtime, just like we are.  Here's a pretty clever little sample of a crook who somehow preempted  our PayPal administrative actions, luckily by a day. But I wonder what would have happened, if this time, the thief was right on time.

We needed to add an email to our paypal stuff, which we did.  However, the day before, someone sent us this little phishing lure.  Our email provider labelled it accurately as SPAM and sent it to the spam box.  But let's say, the guy's timing was better, and he sent it the following day. The day we would have been looking for an email confirmation note from PayPal? 
  Here's how we know the email is bogus.  Hover over the "From" address, and the actual address pops up.

This email looks like it comes from paypal, but is actually from a crook.
    The bait on this phishing attempt is to get us to go to a site that will look identical to PayPal AND enter our Log-in credentials.  The thieves steal our log in creds, change the password, add a bank account, and steal real money.  Or maybe they just access our customer data. Or whatever. Bottom line is, we don't want that hassle, and neither do you or your customers :)

   The phishing attempt came on October 29th.  Here's the legit confirmation email from PayPal, we got on the 30th, when we added John's email to the account.
   Sometimes, it's good to be LUCKY and good, but we'll also settle for just luck.  We know how it is, even from the jammie comfort of the home office.  When we are looking for something that "should" be there, we always check the spam box..
   Now we did not open the phishing email, because, you know, with html 5, opening a message can be all it takes.  As much as we'd love to show you what's inside it, sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.  just trust us, it is a scam.

    Take away: Right now and for the next 3 - 4 months, it's all out smash and grab season for on line thievery.
1) Train your hard working team on the basics.  They want to do things right, and a security breach fouls up everything, along with bringing down team moral.
2) Enforce simple disciplines and protocols for security (hardest to do for OURSELVES).
3) Keep work and play separate, as far as online stuff goes.  If one MUST go to check out the latest Vegas odds for football, then do it from a non-critical computer, not the one your quickbooks are on :)
4) Hover first. Even when something looks 100% legit, hover over it before you click.
5) Say no to juicy stories, cute kittens, and emotional tugs that friends send you links to.  If you must check it out, look it up on google or some other search engine yourself (Links shared on social sites are the MOST MALWARE infested of any, anywhere).

Long gone are the days when internet thievery, creepery, and troll parties haunted mostly the fringes of porn, gambling, and psychic friends websites.  And no wonder. Crooks and scammers may be low-life jackasses, but some of them are pretty sharp.  Luckily, since they aren't, for the most part, holding down real jobs, they have ALL DAY to figure out and perfect ways to rip-off the busy working folks.

Today's internet is a lot like those fancy restaurants where Fight Club's Tyler Durden worked:  Beautiful plate presentations, but woe to those who eat.

But the busy people, with more money than time, come in, order the beautiful and safe looking food, eat, and pay, totally unaware that they've just eaten at least a small bit of the most vile filth.

Earlier this Spring, some very clever folks started sending out malicious emails that appeared very safe and appealing to busy folks trying to get things done.  The emails in this case looked like "EFax" notifications.  The idea was that the email would look real enough and busy folks would click on it to get their fax; except, there was no fax.  What the people got was a trojan infection.

The clever crooks learned that "efaxes" could be "zipped" - that is, compressed.  People who actually use the EFax service were used to getting compressed fax files and then un-zipping them.  For a crook, this is like shooting fish in a barrel.   It's like getting people to rob themselves voluntarily, if unaware.

A crook or other hacker can take a legit word document or any other file and attach a small bit of executable code to it - a piece of malware.  He then "zips" the files, which masks the malware.  This zipped file is then sent to the intended victim. During the un-zipping process, most operating systems will warn the user of potential dangers, but once the user hits that confirmation button to proceed, he has just instructed his computer to execute the code the hacker gift wrapped for him.

The catch:  These scam emails are back in circulation, and if you check your "SPAM" folder, heck, you might see some in there right now.  This is because most services and web  mail providers are all over this threat.  They put it in your spam box for you.  But let's just say your business is waiting on an important fax that has not come through yet.  What do we do?  We look for it.

"Check your "Spam Folder", someone advises.

And you know what just happened......

Actions Steps:
1)  Don't trust zipped files, or .rar or other compressed goods.
2)  If you MUST check them out:
     a) Go to a non-critical computer.
     b) Download the file.
     c) Scan the file with a current, top shelf anti-virus, like Webroot.
     d) Take the computer off line and isolate it from all other networks (WAN and LAN).
     e) Exercise your curiosity and unpack the file.  With any luck, you'll be the hero who found that missing fax :)
     f)  Scan the  unpacked file, just to be sure.
3) Train  busy team members who are busting a$s to keep the team on top.  Nothing breaks up the momentum like a security breach and system  downtime.

Oh, Dear Reader, we know YOU are far too wise, albeit, still short of tooth, and sagacious to fall pray to such foolery. We therefore provide, for your entertainment as well as edification, the following, with no lack of brevity :)

I don't know about you, but in our business, we use Skype for a ton of communication - daily phone calls, click-to-call convenience, call-from CRM, video call interviews (a tremendous time and resource saver).  It's safe to say, we have a lot of skype exposure.
Security rule of thumb: The thieves go to where the traffic and MONEY is.  It used to be that on-line porn and free sex movie websites were the dangerous neighborhoods online, but my how that has changed. Now thieves target the busy, business streets of ether.
So here we have what looks like a legit contact request from someone in banking.  Were I too busy to read the long, boring intro, I might have just accepted. But I LIKE to read long, boring..... um, you get that, right?
Contact request. Looks like a banker. I investigate.
Hmmm.  Seems like a scam. $8,000,000USD in some bank.  Who IS this person? A Nigerian Prince?

But, it is a juicy amount of money.  Of course, I won't contact the guy. That would be foolish :)  But maybe, I would be tempted to check out the story.  It's gossip worthy.

The message raises BIG RED FLAGS.  That news link looks LEGIT though.  Right?

     Now consider this. Thieves are some of the most quick to adapt in any culture.  They think about stealing 24x7.

   So before any one goes clicking any link in this scam, think of this.  The OBJECT is NOT to get you to reply back and engage with this guy.  It's OBVIOUSLY a rip off.

    The object of this trick is to get your gossip on, and click the seemingly SAFE news link.  News sites are some of the most dangerous, mal-ware infested places on the internet., so even if the link were legit, it would be risky.  THIS link looks like it goes to some bbc news; however, it goes somewhere else (we have deleted and removed the link for safety, and the lawyers made us).

     These days, one merely has to click a link to activate a very fast acting script (that the click has now given permission to run), to activate an HTML5 code that will instantly read, copy and transmit certain targeted spots on your machine - like password storage, picture files.. whatever.  We don't want anything leaving our machine without permission, especially those photos from last year's Christmas Party :$

   Sweet dreams everyone and, please be safe out there.

Some folks say the best way to have money is to not spend it!  Truth.
Poor folks blow money on all kinds of stuff, and like Chuck Palahniuk's Tyler Durden observed, "the things you own end up owning you". Go visit and get a good book  http://chuckpalahniuk.net/books
But, gosh, don't the rich blow all kinds of money too?  I mean just WHO is buying all that high-end loot advertised in GQ, Forbes Life, and The Kiplinger Report?
And who is manipulating the price of oil and trading carbon credits and junk? That can't be cheap and has to be the work of rich folk.

If we may ever so humbly opine:

Rich or Poor is not a statement of one's financial position or check book balance or income.

Rich or Poor is a description of a state of mind: Rich and Poor folks live differently, no matter how much money they have.  Listen to Dave Ramsey http://www.daveramsey.com/home/ and he will tell us that "if we want to be rich, we have to do rich people stuff".

We do want to be rich!  SO just what is this "rich people stuff" and how do we DO it?

We STUDY!!  AND READ!!  AND TURN OFF THE TELEVISION!! (Turning off the television is rich people stuff!  Some studies state that the average adult spends an additional $200 per year for every HOUR of television they watch on a weekly average.  If this is true or not, I don't know, but I don't like TV and this makes sense to me. Watching TV, every few minutes, someone is urging us to BUY BUY BUY.  I can't imagine soaking a chicken breast in Teriyaki Sauce a couple hours a day and have it come out not tasting just a little bit like Teriyaki Sauce. Brains are probably the same.)

SO rich folks don't watch much television, but what about their SPENDING!  How can we as "sales people" be urging folks to not spend money?? 

Rich folks save money, refusing to buy junk.  Rich folks spend money on things that will make them more money (not lottery tickets). 

Some observations:

Rich folks will pack their lunch and coffee everyday for work, and eat the same-old same old for weeks.  Poor folks will spend $4.79 on lunch and coffee, everyday, and "buy themselves a treat" that they "deserve".  The rich has an extra $1,000 or so a year, just on that one difference.

Poor folks balk at the thought of spending $499 on a college course. They "can't afford it".  Yet over the length of the class they did not take, they will spend $1.89 a day for a bottle of soda.... You see where that is going.

Rich folks skip the soda, buy the class, and become more valuable at work, and get a raise.

Can spending $5,000 on a piece of equipment be a better deal than a $1.89 bottle of soda?  HELL YES!  Which one is rich people stuff, buying the capital equipment or the soda?  It depends, but, my guess is, successful business owners (the rich folks) are spending a lot less money on soda, as a percentage of revenues, than they are on the right equipment and service.