I put together a decent computer for my cousin last year. An AMD socket 939 4600+ dual core CPU, Epox 9NPA3+ motherboard, two gigabytes of DDR 400 RAM, an Nvidia 7900 PCIE video card, and Seagate 500 gigabyte hard drive. These were all used parts (with the exception of the hard drive), but in good condition. Sadly, after only having it for about nine months, it began to have some problems. Since I live so far away, I advised her to take it to a nearby computer servicer to have it checked out.
So she brought it to Computer Mechanix, and they diagnosed it as having a bad motherboard. I was a little suspicious of this diagnosis, but I sent her a spare motherboard/memory/CPU combination that I had. I didn't ask what they quoted her for the swap.
Some time went by, and I finally asked her if she had ever had it repaired. She told me that she was still saving money to have it done. I asked her what they wanted for swapping in the replacement motherboard, and she told me the quote was $320.00! I had her ship the computer and the spare motherboard combo back to me, and I would do it for her.
Three hundred and twenty dollars to swap a motherboard and reinstall the customer's copy of Windows seems somewhat high to me. But I've never had to pay anyone to work on my computer, so maybe that is about industry standard. But here is the sad part; within a half an hour of pulling it out of the box, I had determined that there was nothing wrong with the motherboard. The failing component was the video card. I swapped in an Nvidia 9500 GT card, and the computer worked perfectly! If they had bothered to do the job she paid them to do (correctly diagnose the problem with her computer) they would have discovered that, sold her another inexpensive video card (maybe $100.00 parts and labor?) and she would have had her computer back months ago. People like myself have spare parts lying around, which makes it easy to diagnose a hardware issue such as this. People like my cousin do not, and have to rely on businesses such as Computer Mechanix to do it for them. I am an amateur, and I found the actual problem in less than an hour.
My advice would be to take your computer somewhere else if you need to have it serviced. read more
