PC repair companies: are they the ones that need fixing?

This is a very short article – where’s the full report?

I’ll first admit to a vested interest in spades! Husband and I run a computer repair company near Northampton.

Redline: search terms are a real pain in our business. Try searching for ‘computer’, ‘PC’ and/or ‘laptop’, with ‘repair’ and ‘service’. The permutations of business classifications used by traders’ sites that apply to our kind of business are a headache – including Which! Why did this whole report only look at laptop repairs? Repairing desktop computers or all-in-one systems isn’t significantly different.

Darmzy: Sometimes it is very hard to tell what went wrong. That was a very odd problem you had! They did retrieve your files, which can be difficult and take a very long time. In your case we’d have spent hours testing and re-testing the laptop and the external drive, trying to find something to give us a clue. Don’t conclude that they are incompetent, that really isn’t fair. Just make sure that you take frequent backups. Maybe you should consider a cloud backup as well as the external hard drive – many experts will tell you that one backup is no backup at all.

Technical competence, in the sense of being able to diagnose and fix a computer, is the easy bit. There are plenty of people who are capable of working out what’s wrong and putting it right. What’s missing from most of them are the ability, patience and willingness to communicate with ‘non-geek’ clients in plain English, and the acceptance that as experts being employed for their superior knowledge they have a duty of care – to use that superior knowledge to give your computer back to you in a fit state to be used.

We wouldn’t think of doing anything much to a client’s computer without first securing their files by making an external backup of the entire hard drive, and we have a low opinion of the many computer repair companies who do not. It isn’t difficult, it isn’t a significant overhead, and it gives us ‘insurance’ too in being able to go back to the beginning and start again if necessary!

We always diagnose free of charge and give a quote, we don’t charge if we fail. If we can do it, so can others.

Demand the level of service, explanations, safeguards and consideration you need in order to feel comfortable handing over your computer – or go elsewhere.

Many local authorities Trading Standards departments use the Buy with Confidence scheme, and there are lots of PC/computer/laptop repair/service (!) companies on them. A good place to start looking for any sort of trader. And of course, as ever, personal recommendations are valuable.

P.S. We are not on the Trusted Trader scheme because we are already members of the Buy with Confidence scheme, and cannot justify the additional expense.

I was very disappointed to see if your valuation of Independents. You went to one Independent computer repairer with multiple stores, you did not receive a good service and then attributed the results to all independents. You would have had a much fairer and clearer results if you had actually visited 3 totally independent stores and by that I mean 3 independent of each other. You cannot label all independents to be bad by one companies practices. I offer free diagnostics, no fix no fee. Any time I recommend a hard drive replacement is because I have performed hard drive diagnostic tests, and a printed version of these results is given to the customer to prove test failure. I also operate on a fixed price which is agreed before any work is actually carried out.

I’d be interested to know what fault you introduced to these laptops, and whether it really represented a typical scenario that laptop repair places would be expected to recognise and deal with. For example, if you switched a setting in the BIOS so that it wouldn’t boot from the hard disk – that is not a typical thing that would happen without the user knowing they had done something, but it should be easily diagnosable all the same. I can’t quite work out from your article (including the full article in the magazine) what the exact fault was, though.

In December 2014 I took two laptops with problems to PC World’s KnowHow Team at the Castle Marina Retail Park in Nottingham. With one machine I told them I was happy to have it reset without preserving any data. With the other, my express and repeated instructions were to preserve at all costs the data and software applications on there. They had not done the agreed work 3-4 working days after the agreed date for completion and on eventual collection, it transpired that PC World’s KnowHow Team had wiped all data and applications from both machines, reset the password on one, failed to record or communicate what the new password was and initially denied they had done this. The telephone “help” service was labyrinthine and obstructive; the manager’s response was that the laptop needed to be reset, and the loss of data and software was therefore inevitable and I should have read the small print – and the promised phone call from the “Save Our Customer Team” has never materialised. I paid £130 for this “service”, which has cost me considerably more than this in the time and effort and potentially money needed to restore the lost applications. Am I to believe that the KnowHow team have neither the technical expertise nor the equipment to copy and re-install software and data?