Retail Chain PC Repair Shops?

You hear these stories online about GeekSquad & Easy Techs but this is the first one I can comment on first hand & I wanted to share it with you all. My co-worker’s home PC died over the weekend so he took it to his local Staples for Easy Tech to look at. They diagnosed the PC had a bad motherboard and a replacement would run $180. So he decided to buy a new computer. Monday morning he was telling me about this because he wanted to copy his data from the old hard drive to the new system. Thankfully he didn't pay anyone to do that! He offered to give me the old PC for parts. The next day he brought the dead PC to me. I took it home to my bench and plugged it up & hit the power button. Nothing, it was dead. So I tested the power supply, it was fine. I pulled the RAM, modem and NIC, leaving the power supply, motherboard and processer then hit the power button and the PC came to life with the HP BIOS info. So I put the RAM back in, still booting, modem, still booting, the NIC, system died. I pulled the NIC and the system booted fine.
Where do these people get off calling themselves techs? With everyone hanging out their ‘pc repair’ shingle, real techs are getting such a bad name. But I got a new computer thanks to the Easy Techs "skills". I don’t think I’ve seen any claims of CompTIA certifications at any of those repair sites?

Really.

 

The local repair shop near me charges 50 euros per hour ($70) plus parts and their best answer to malware is re-format and i have done 2 PCs that were diagnosed as needing re-format that was nothing more than MBAM and Superantispyware, they are both running perfectly.

 

Last week I got a call about a laptop another friend bought at Walmart. They purchased a 2 year protection plan. So the laptop will not boot, they call the Walmart protection plan, who tells them to (of course) "re-image". Which they didn't create the recovery media on their own and Sony doesn't provide, I guess since media is so expensive. So Walmart told them to buy recovery media from Sony. So I get the call to see if I can fix the issue. The system boots to the Windows logo, that is it. I start all my repairs by imaging the drive. The disk wouldn't image because of errors. So I get the UBCD out and run it. WD diagnostics says there are too many errors to continue. So the system has a bad hard drive. Granted they are still going to have to buy recovery media, but how long would it of taken to get to the root cause?

 

If i had a dollor for everytime a customer said "no good ahead erase everything i just want the dam thing to work" then bitched that everything was indeed gone to us and his neighbors and everyone they know, id be rich!

 

Those techs need a something called integrity. There is no way I could work at a place that basically steals money from people because it is their procedure.

I am sure there are a few techs out there that actually do their jobs well, just no one posts about those.

http://consumerist.com/2008/09/why-i-quit-staples-easy-tech.html

 

A customer satisfied by exceptional service will tell 2 or 3 of their friends.
A customer who receives poor service will tell everyone they know AND post about it on the net.

Staples are bad though, as are Futureshop.
Futureshop want $65 labour to install new ram..... $65?.... really?... for 3 minutes work?

A co-worker of mine dropped her External HDD and now it wont work, instead of asking me first she took it to Staples, they told her to get all her Data transferred to a new Drive would cost between $180-$800 depending on how damaged the drive is.

I told her to spend $20 on an external case and it will probably be fine providing the drive itself isn't damaged (which I doubt, from what she's told me it's the case that has been damaged.)

Regardless, for a simple Data recovery from a working drive they want $180, I wish I could charge that, I usually charge about $20 for simple Data recovery.

 

I think you would be in a minority foogoo because the world now is just about profit.
I am also old school and would always help someone rather than rip them off.
Short story.
I had a tech visit my home a couple of weeks ago and MGs page was open on the PC, he asked what i was reading and i said i was helping a member who was building their own PC and the first thing he said was "how much do you make doing that", he was dumbfounded when i said that as members we were all volunteers.

 

As corny as it might sound, IMO we help on this site for no other reason than to receive thanks from the person(s) we help, give something back to a community that has helped us in the past and simply be a part of a website well known for it's expertise and assistance.

 

And it's nutters.

 

That goes without saying, doesn't it? :-D

 

I think its because they like to hire kids fresh out of college with lots of qualifications but little hands on experience fixing computers,I'm not saying qualifications are a bad thing in any way but they need to do a a good couple of years being mentored by someone with experience before they're left to their own devices.

Whenever I look behind the counter at these place "PC world over here springs to mind" All I see are pimply kids and think where are all the adults:-D Maybe I'm just becoming an old fart.

As a general rule I agree with Halo you can have a good and bad places,in my experience though they just want to throw in a new part quick smart charge you for it and hope the problem goes away,again in my experience its either a hard drive or PSU simply because they are easy to do and they can charge whatever they feel like.

You can throw in a PSU in 10 minutes and charge £50 for labour,that's £300 an hour:-D If it works great you won't come back if it doesn't hell bring it back and we'll throw something else in "What? You want your old PSU putting back in because it wasn't the problem,no we tested it your voltages were all screwey so its probably took something else out with it."

Yeah thanks for maxing my card and wasting 2 months of my life replacing every part in my computer until you got lucky:-D