The single most common thing we tell people is that they do not need a new computer. A machine that takes four minutes to boot, runs hot, and stalls when you open a second browser tab is very often three or four years old with a mechanical hard drive and 8 GB of RAM — and both of those are cheap, fast fixes.
Swapping a mechanical drive for an SSD is the single biggest speed improvement available for an older computer, and it is not close. Boot times typically drop from minutes to seconds, and applications that used to hang while loading simply stop hanging. With data migration included, that job is $60 plus the cost of the drive. A replacement laptop of equivalent capability starts around $700.
We will tell you when a machine genuinely is not worth repairing. If the motherboard has failed on a six-year-old laptop, or the repair cost approaches half the price of a replacement, we say so — and we would rather lose the job than take $400 from you for a machine that will fail again in eight months.
What "free diagnostics" actually means here
Free diagnostics is a phrase every repair shop uses, and it does not always mean the same thing. Ours means this: you bring the machine in or we collect it, we identify the actual fault, and we tell you what it costs to fix. There is no charge for that, whether you proceed or not, and there is no fee that quietly reappears on the final invoice.
What we will not do is quote a price before we know the fault. "Laptop won't turn on" covers a dead charger, a failed battery, a blown power jack and a dead motherboard — those range from $30 to not-worth-repairing. Any shop that quotes that sight-unseen is guessing, and the guess is rarely in your favour.
Back up before you bring it in, if you still can
We back up your data before any repair that touches storage or the operating system, and our data recovery service exists precisely for the times that is no longer possible. But if the machine still boots, copy anything irreplaceable to an external drive or cloud storage first. No repair shop can guarantee data on a drive that is already failing, and the honest version of that sentence is worth more to you than a reassuring one.
Brands and parts
We repair all major brands — Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, Acer, MSI, Apple, Microsoft Surface and custom-built desktops. Some models are genuinely difficult: Surface devices are glued rather than screwed, and certain ultrabooks solder the RAM to the board so it cannot be upgraded at all. Where a repair is impractical or a part cannot be sourced, we tell you at the diagnostic stage rather than leaving the machine sitting on a bench for three weeks.