Reimage: The Domino's Pizza of PC repair?

I'm here at Interop NY doing a couple of panels as part of the Mobile Business Expo, but I had time to stop by and meet with the folks from Reimage (think "re-image", not "ray-mage"), which launched its new online PC repair service, geared towards PC technicians and IT support staff. The company says it can "efficiently and effectively repair Windows XP issues in 30 minutes or less" without compromising the user's data or applications.

Reimage performs its "magic" by doing "what a human being would do when repairing a PC", the company says. The service observes what's going on with the PC, and then acts accordingly. The service scans a database of more than 8 million spare systems files and registry objects, looking for objects that are missing, changed or new objects placed there by malware, viruses or other such nasties. The service replaces the missing objects or restores them to its original state. For new objects or bad objects, the service doesn't delete them, but rather "unbinds" them from the operating system, so they can't continue to do any damage. The company says it can also repair XP-based PCs that cannot boot up with a Windows XP boot PC, and a Vista repair service will become available soon.

I got a quick demo of the service (the CEO, Zak Dechovich, showed me a virtualized "bad" computer and then used the service to fix it), and I was impressed at how it took a poorly responding system and brought it back to life.

The company was at the show signing up PC techs and IT support staff, and said it would charge about $10 to $20 per scan for those markets. Plans for a consumer-based offering are in the works, and Dechovich said pricing would be competitive to other online diagnosis offerings (Reimage says it's the only company that can fix your PC remotely and automatically).