Has A PC Repair Shop Taken Advantage Of You?

by: David Armstrong

I heard a funny story the other day that made think there is a real serious problem out there, let me explain, in my job, I meet many different people and when they ask me what I do, I tell them "I'm a computer engineer".

Then it all starts, usually something like this: "my pc was running slow, so I put it into a shop, got it back cost me a fortune and 1 month later it's as bad as ever".

Here's the thing, how many times have you just needed to print or email one thing before you do something and there you are 30 minutes later trying this or trying that, so what do you do, you put it in the repair shop.

Problem is not all engineers advise you to the best of their ability, so is it your fault for not asking the right questions or the engineers for just fixing the fault and not assessing the full PC, I will walk you through one conversation that leads to me fixing the woman's computer.

Sitting on the train chatting to a woman I see on the train from time to time, this one day she asked me what I work as, I Replied "I'm a computer engineer", then she told me she had an engineer come to her house take her PC away and bring it back, it cost her over $200 and the computer was still not working very well.

I asked her the specification of her PC, unfortunately she did not know, after several more days she asked me if I could have a look at here PC and I agreed, when I checked here PC I found the following problems: " Not enough Ram memory. " 2 Viruses and 1 active spyware. " A bad sector on the hard drive.

So if the PC was repaired less than 1 month ago what happened? I asked the woman what was the original problem she complained about, she said to the lady in the repair shop "my PC keeps rebooting".

When you take a PC into a repair shop, the engineers are generally very busy people so if they see a computer problem sheet from the front shop saying "PC keeps rebooting", they will " Swap the memory. " Check the processor fan to ensure the PC is not over heating " Then restore the PC from the recovery CD

As this seems to be the most common problems, however if the woman said "I want my memory and hard drive tested" the problem would have been picked up that she had bad sectors on her hard drive and that it should be replaced.

The next problem was that the computer was slow, so when the woman said to the lady at the computer shop "my PC was also very slow", the engineers probably thought Spyware or a Virus was causing the PC to reboot so by reinstalling the system using the recovery CD that will be both problems fixed.

What the woman should have said was something like "my PC runs slow and here are some examples, please can you test." E.g. " Firefox takes 26 seconds to open up " Outlook Express takes 15 seconds to open up " Picture andrew.gif takes 42 seconds to open up.

This would have given the engineers something to go on for comparison, when I checked the woman's computer, it turned out it only had 192meg of ram 1*128meg and 1*64meg, I told the woman to put 512meg into the computer for a fast PC.

Yes Yes I can hear you all screaming "If the engineers did there jobs properly they would have picked up on this" and yes I 100% agree, problem is more and more people are having similar problems when dealing with PC repair shops.

So my advice to you all would be what ever problem you have, ask the question on a search engine followed by +forum e.g.

Computer running slow +forum

This will generally take you to web sites that cleaver people hang about on and either help you fix the problem(s) or give you a good idea what to tell the first point of call at the PC repair shop

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