Thursday July 29, 2010

GET YOUR COMPUTER FIXED RIGHT AWAY WITH NO EXPEDITE FEES

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Real computer service example – Dead and used laptops

BACKGROUND: Recently one of our Milwaukee area customers brought in a ~5 year old IBM Thinkpad laptop which had already been in and out of the Geek Squad with no results except “too expensive to repair” and “you should buy a new laptop” so this customer paid them a diagnostic fee for nothing and did not even receive any useful information. So when they brought the laptop to us, we started out with a FREE checkup and FREE expediting, with no obligation on the part of our customer to purchase anything at all.

PROBLEM: The problem with the laptop itself was video related and unique to this unit, that is, no other computers we have worked with have shown the exact same symptoms. When you first turn it on, the video would come up just fine. However, as it ran longer – maybe sooner, maybe later – the video would start freaking out something like old TV’s falling out of horizontal sync, then progressing into garbled characters on the screen, and finally just locking up all together. This process could be accelerated significantly by just moving the unit around a little bit.

Experience dictates that the problem seemed to be heat and/or power related, however, one of the screen hinges was broken loose also, and therefore could also be a loose or stressed video cable. However, when we tried plugging in an external monitor, the same symptoms occurred on the external too, even with the built-in LCD turned off. Therefore, we officially diagnosed it as a bad motherboard, since the video hardware is integrated into and part of the motherboard. It turns out the Geek Squad was right on this one. We also did manage to get it to work well enough long enough that it passed basic memory and hard drive tests, and with the hard drive being okay we still had data, which our customer really needed. There were hundreds of documents and pictures and other important files.

RESOLUTION: Our customer wanted to buy a refurbished laptop from us, however we were all sold out at the time and unsure when we would get more in. We told him to wait a bit for the impending back to school specials and then buy a new unit from one of the big box stores or online discount retailers. While waiting, we held his broken laptop in our shop pending data transfer to the new one. About one week later, our customer brought in a used Dell Inspiron laptop which he had bought from a friend near Milwaukee and asked if it would be suitable for his needs, which it appeared to be at first glance. After running diagnostic tests on it, aside from having a slightly loose DC Jack and missing the grounding prong on the power cord, it passed basic hardware diagnostics and software-wise had genuine windows, an illegal (improperly licensed) copy of Microsoft Office 2007, was missing some device drivers, needed some windows updates, lacked anti-virus software, had some spyware on it, and had traces of user activity from the previous owner. Therefore, we removed the illegal Office installation and fixed the other software issues to bring the laptop into good working order, and then copied the customers’ data back onto it and advised him to be gentle on the power jack and consider getting a replacement power cable which included the grounding prong.

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• Computers For Sale

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  • Milwaukee – $275 – IBM ThinkCentre SFF with 17″ LCD – P4 3.2Ghz with Hyperthreading 1024MB 40GB CDROM XP Pro