After a series of terrible things happening in the last few weeks, I awoke on Tuesday, after 3…read morehours of sleep, to see the laptop stuck in some sort of updating loop.
Feeling certain that nothing else could possibly go wrong, I went with denial and went to work. Imagine my surprise when I was heading home and my husband informed me he was unable to perform a factory reset. ;) So I turn to Yelp, and this was the first listing I called.
The staff was very professional on the phone, and very helpful with answering my questions. I was told a diagnosis would be $50 and then that cost would go towards the cost of repair. In discussing options, he told me that a fresh install would be $90 plus tax, while backing up files would be $135. He suggested we come in before close so they could run the diagnostic overnight and keep the timeframe within a couple of days.
I did call a couple of other places, just to check my options. This place seemed the most professional and had reasonable prices, while others were at least $65 more. Other places also stated they would have it 2-3 days minimum, but this company seems to understand people don't like being away from there stuff too long, lol.
My husband and I brought it in about 5pm, an hour before they close. Based on our description, he seemed to understand what it was and said there had been many issues with an update in the last couple of days. They were of course going to verify with the diagnostic.
It took such a long time to boot up that we started talking about the potential of a corrupted hard drive. To replace at it's normal size would not really add on to the time and would be $50. We even discussed upgrading it, which would be another $40, but add a couple of days for ordering parts.
He assured us that we would get a call in the morning after they looked over the diagnostic, and they would let us know the exact problem and price before starting additional work. I liked this as I want to control my overall cost, instead of having it happen to me, whether I want it or not.
We had already discussed what we wanted to do based on the age of the laptop and what could and couldn't be replaced on it. So we had an idea of how much everything would cost from the beginning. Since they are open from 9am to 6pm, we were hoping that one full day would be enough, but figured it might be a day and a half.
I received an email with the status notes before I even left the parking lot. Nice touch! They called within an hour of opening the next day, but I was completely slammed at work and didn't get the message until closer to noon. The message was very detailed and assured me that our hard drive was fine.
The call back was simple and easy and they got to work. Due to the time of the day, they said they would call if it was ready the same day, but it would most likely be the next morning. My husband picked it up around 10:30am the next morning without any surprise fees or issues. We even had our favorites menu still intact, and I can barely get my work tech support to do that right, haha!
Overall, we are very satisfied with $135 plus tax to save our files and not have to buy a new laptop. The turn time for work is reasonable and the employees are knowledgeable. Hopefully, we don't need to see them again any time soon, but I would definitely use them again if the need arose!
