Topic: PC Technicians... Or El Bandito!

[prometheus]

I had a friend come to me today with a malfunctioning lap top, with a Bios Checksum Error which I had diagnosed and repaired within two minutes, and gave him a procedure to follow incase it should occur again... 

He informed me that before he thought of showing me the computer, he'd taken it to his local shop where the technician booted it up, very little happened, and he anounced that the computer had a broken hard disk that he would replace for £124.00 ($217.71).

I am appalled and mystified at the number of cowboys in this industry...  One of the charges was £30.00 ($52.67) for "labour costs" in replacing the hard disk, which would take all of thirty seconds, and then £40.00 ($70.23) to reinstall windows, which is about a half dozen mouse clicks and then you leave Alan Turing in the drivers seat...   

The only good thing about is that it means whenever I run out of money, all I have to do is put an ad in the local shops saying "computers repaired for £10.00 or less" and I always get a load of phone calls, but in principle I'm disgusted...

[Nemesis]

About 15 years ago one of my friends worked for a department store chain.  The registers would lock up once or twice a week and the "expert" would come in to fix it for $600 per visit.  He would carefully make sure that no one could see what he did but my friend saw him once - he pushed the reset button.  Management refused to believe or to allow the reset button to be pushed.

[E_Look]

A friend of a friend asked me, and I didn't know, what was wrong with his laptop.  It won't power on.  The store techs said it was a bad motherboard, proprietary of course, and would cost $300 US.  I thought that was a bit high, and wondered if it may not be a battery problem.

I think it's easier to fleece folks with laptops and notebooks, as you really can't buy the parts yourself easily and shop for prices.

[prometheus]

A friend of a friend asked me, and I didn't know, what was wrong with his laptop.  It won't power on.  The store techs said it was a bad motherboard, proprietary of course, and would cost $300 US.  I thought that was a bit high, and wondered if it may not be a battery problem.

I think it's easier to fleece folks with laptops and notebooks, as you really can't buy the parts yourself easily and shop for prices.

Yeah, I don't really have much time for laptops...  Since I don't really need mobile computing power, I prefer just to keep lots of old towers lying around that I can move out to other places if I need to...

[prometheus]

About 15 years ago one of my friends worked for a department store chain.  The registers would lock up once or twice a week and the "expert" would come in to fix it for $600 per visit.  He would carefully make sure that no one could see what he did but my friend saw him once - he pushed the reset button.  Management refused to believe or to allow the reset button to be pushed.

My old work was the same.  There were at least half a dozen people there who were very advanced computer users who could have handled the network in their sleep given time to become familiar with it, but the company would not hear of it...   They preferred to spend exorbitant amounts of money having the company send an engineer out...