At the moment, we’re just looking for details of people’s experiences – we can’t name and shame here without any evidence, for obvious reasons! (And thanks for your feedback – I’ve edited the post to clarify this.)

If you’ve had a bad PC repair experience, let me know…

I think you will not get a large response here, most PCPRO readers are proficient and don’t visit their local PC shop for repairs etc.

There are unscrupulous traders in many trades. Cars, Plumbing, Electrical, etc. But, by comparison PC repair shops are pretty good value for most problems.

I used to work in a repair shop, and some of the symptoms described by customers just couldn’t be diagnosed for the minimum charge we asked. The shop couldn’t survive with the small rates we were charging. So, the shop closed for good, a couple of years ago.

Backing up is the responsibilty of the customer, as most repair shops state quite clearly at the front desk. Trying to back up half a terabyte or more is time consuming, and not without risks. Such as copying someone elses files to another customers PC.

Go ahead, sod off and pay £30 at PCWorld. Just don’t be surprised if they wipe your disks.

A Dell computer kept blue screening. Dell charged £60 for recovery disks. A re-install of XP didn’t help so sent it back to Dell under 3 year extended warranty and they sent it back saying the HDD was at fault and they’d replaced it. It came back blank.

After installing XP again it kepy blue screening so took it to a local PC shop who had a look and said that they’d run diagnostics and there was nothing wrong with it. They charged £50. It then continued to blue screen. Dell customer support said to take the RAM out and give it a blow to clear any dust. They then tried to charge for the advice. Although the warranty covered hardware and not software issues, this was a hardware issue. They ended up charging around £30. Another call to Dell to get it refunded and the problem was stil occurring.

Took it back to the local PC shop, they said they would sell 2x 256mb sticks of DDR2 533mhz for £13 a piece. Went direct to Crucial in the end and got 1x 1gb stick for £12.64 including shipping and the problem was solved.

I feel that quite a bit of animosity will erupt here. Many PC Pro readers are very knowledgeable of PC repair symptoms, diagnoses and methods and this will end up as a geek vs non geek thread.

Chris’s story boils down to a PC repair shop charging £50 to run a diagnosis and adding a 100% markup onto Crucial memory. Apart from knowing that memtest does not find all RAM faults, I don’t see much wrong here. Dell are useless, but the Pope’s also Catholic.

If you genuinely find a small amount of PC repair shops being names repeatedly, great, but if it turns into a witch-hunt it will backfire.

I don’t use repair shops as I do it all myself. However, PC World never fails to shock me with their scarey lack of knowledge. The number of times I’ve found myself in the tech support queue and end up giving tech support TO the tech support guys is incredible.

The most memorable is that a chap brought in his IOMEGA ZIP drive as it had broken (which I’ve never heard of before ). The thing is, it had broken with a ZIP disk in there containing data that he needed. The tech support guy proceeded to try and remove the disk with a PAIR OF PLIERS! I quickly jumped in and advised him to insert a paperclip into the eject hole. So he started poking a paper clip into the power connector! I corrected him again and he was shocked at how easy it was. I pointed out that that was described on the first page of the instruction manual. He was shocked again. I wondered if he knew what an instruction manual was (or how to read).

A number of years ago, before I knew enough to build my own PC, I bought a PC from a well-known UK PC shop chain. Now let’s skip past the fact that they managed to give me bad advice on the machine itself (they told me that a rig with a Geforce 4 MX 440, a rebranded Geforce 2, was faster than a similarly priced rig with a Geforce 3 Ti; as I said, I didn’t know very much back then), and move on to when the PSU gave up the ghost some two years later, still well within the 5 year warranty my Dad generously paid £300 for.

Initial impressions were good – the guy I talked to on the phone seemed to know what he was talking about, diagnosed the problem and organised a repair man to visit. I was told the repair man would replace the PSU and take the old one away.

The repair man arrived on the date given. He took the old PSU out and…then went away, giving no clue as to when he’d be back. Apparently they were going to see if they could repair the PSU…

The warranty stated that if the repair had not taken place in 6 weeks, they would provide me with a new PC. Some 5 weeks and 5 days after the original fault, and a fair amount of money spent complaining to support staff over the phone, the PSU finally arrived. Their excuse was they didn’t have any micro-ATX power supplies in stock.

Thankfully, I am now able to build my own PCs with ease, but as a result I now realise how much utter tosh I put up with during that period. I was an undergraduate student at the time, and the 6 weeks without my PC or data was a problem – thankfully my girlfriend was understanding and let me use her laptop to do assignments. I was not at any time offered any sort of compensation for the time it took to replace a part so simple as a PSU, and the fact that my Dad paid £300 for a warranty we used once for a part that should have taken at most £50 and an afternoon to replace still leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I took a laptop to PC World to have data taken from disk as needed to wipe hard drive due to errors (advised by Dell that this needed doing – cant remember the actual problems) laptop would not recognise any external drives so I could not get the data off myself. PC World damaged the connections on the disk so I had to buy a new disk from Dell at a cost of several hundred pounds – PC World did refund the cost of the disk but I still had to pay someone else who managed to get the data off the original disk which was made more difficult because of the damage, and the hassle of a 60 mile round trip twice to PC World but didnt get any compensation. At least they admitted that they had damaged the connections on the original disk!

As a professional engineer & computer/electronics lecturer I was called for a second opinion after a young local girl was asked over £100 for ‘essential upgrades’ after she had only asked for a quote to repair the PC. The shop stated it has replaced a lot of the hardware. I told her to take it back and insist the old parts were replaced as she had only asked for a quote. When I later examined the PC all it needed was routine file management regarding operating system faults. I gave it the once over and didn’t charge her anything. This was a total con and my experiences with other individuals is that there are too many shops who do con the non-technically aware customer. However, I can’t see any easy way to resolve these problems as Joe Public in general is not technically switched on.

Well, I have seen all sorts as I run a quality PC repair service myself. Lately I have followed the work of a large repair chain who charged a nice Little old Lady with a computer fault £90 to fix it. The problem was that the machine keep beeping when she turned it on? and the cure! lifting the book that was sat on the keyboard pining down a key off!! And yes they did not tell her this is what they had done to fix it…
Another was a chap who had been charged £190 for a new monitor and video card, they had left the supposedly faulty kit behind, and what was the problem? A couple of bent pins on the video lead…
I have no problem with not knowing the answer, but its not hard to look up a problem on the Internet if you don’t know…Every day is a day in school after all in this business.

I took my Toshiba Laptop to PC world last mth as the DC jack was loose and the laptop would not power up. The kid behid the counter, the so called “Tech Guy” said “oh it’s attached directly to the Motherboard and we will have to replace it”. Not only was this information incorrect they wanted to charge me £225 up front before they would look at it properly. I was left wondering if I would in deed receive a new motherboard or my money back if they just replaced the part. Hmm…..

Took my machine into PC world and they stitched me RIGHT up. Gits…

RAM Problems and Diagnostic!

Microsoft have freeware that can be used to create a bootable CD disk to check the RAM.
Vista comes with this software built in, so you can just boot to diagnostics and test the RAM.
Some Dell systems also allow you to test all the hardware fully.

This can be done by the user or in a shop – knowing this and how to test is why people pay money! Some people dont know what RAM means or CPU stands for. They could not tell the difference between Quad core and Single core. These are the people that need help and find it in repair shops – usually!

Try finding a part for your 7 year old car, ordering it and fitting it. If your IT literate, you DIY, if your not you buy in shop and pay the insurance cover.

1) I purchased a Desktop PC with OEM operating system. Therefore I had no copy on a CD.

2) The Hard Drive was faulty and replaced. The engineer reloaded the operating system and left the “emergency CDs” that he used but took away the original emergency floppy disks provided with the PC

3) A few years later, I decided to reformat and change the number of partitions on the Hard Drive. I did this but I could not restart the operating system as I needed the original emergency floppy disks. Both the repairer and the PC manufacturer refused to provide them or a code to activate some “ghost* software embedded in the motherboard. So they want me to buy a new operating system. Why should I pay a second time – the OEM is a device to attract PC manufacturers to use a particular operating system by reducing the cost to them and it offers them security as it prevents customers having the software on disk and being tempted to load it onto several PCs. But who foots the bill in reality?

i expect these muppets can be guessed anyway… but had a p3-500 pc 10 years ago that developed a fault with the on mobo gfx. the shop suggested a replacement agp card, price was middle range and looked fine so i agreed for them to fit it. they called me latter to say as i had no apg slot they needed to switch it for a pci one, fine, price was the same and the pc would be ready the next day. the next day i collected, asked if the problem was solved and they said yes. i took it home to find nothing showed on the monitor. i rang them to report the fault and they said “yes we had that problem too” – they didnt seem to think a pc sent in with an fx card problem that when fixed didnt feed a monitor with a signal was a failure to fix. i told them it was coming back and they had to fix it, they were not happy but in those days the pc was heavy enough to be returned through the window so they agreed. 3 days later they realised they didnt “switch the jumper” so the mobo wasnt defaulting to its fx chip. last time i ever used them for anything

In a shipping company I worked for we relied on A3 dot matrix printers to print ships manifests on multi-part paper. They were crtical to us and we had two in a separate room buzzing away most of the day.

When one of them went wrong we called the organisation that supported our hardware (a big well known IT company) who dispatched an engineer urgently, as I said they were critical to us for legal reasons. The guy turned up and I left him to it. He immediately and without asking anyone took himself off to our companies free resturant and started his lunch. He was most upset when I interrupted his lunch to reset his priorities from his jacket potato to our printers! He challenged my ethics for not allowing him to have a proper break!!!

When I passed the room a bit later I was alerted to the lack of noise from the room; remember only one of the printers had failed, I expected the other to be in use constantly. It was at this point that he explained how he had become confused about the workings of the printer which he hadn’t worked on previously and to discover how it was suppposed to work had started to dismantle the working printer!

I gave him 30 mins to get the working printer back on-line and to leave the building.

I doubt you will be able to use it for your article but I couldn’t beleive it.

I spoke to Sky the other day and they’re still interested in investigating allegedly poor service at the hands of more PC repair shops – they’ve already followed up one of our leads. Just in case something occurs to you (and you haven’t already let me know the details) then feel free to email me – editor at pcpro.co.uk

While there’s no doubt that some repairers will overcharge in some instances, customers never seem interested in the fact that they are paying an entity that exists to make money and seem to think that just because computers are now commodoty items it should cost next to nothing to fix them. Businesses have overheads and none directly billable expenses.
A reasonable person will realise that £100 for a full diagnosis, data recovery, rebuild, re-configuration, all windows updates, virus and maintenance pack and software pack is an absolute steal.
Whereas most of the morons in the area where I work think it’s far too expensive as they do not understand what’s involved, how many hours labour it will take and ‘I can buy a new one for £350′. Try then to charge a diagnosis fee (free call out mind you!) and watch the fireworks fly…usually from a hairdresser or some such who charges about £55 for a cut!