They didn't diagnose the root cause of my PC problems, and did a bad job "fixing" my PC. They "lost" a part from my PC, and had horrible follow through on returning it to me.
I brought my PC in because it wouldn't turn on, nor POST with any beep codes. A week and a half later when I called them to ask how the repair was going, I was told that "the PC was built wrong." This seemed odd to me because 1. I built it myself 2 years ago, and 2. My gaming rig worked fine for the last 2 years despite being "built wrong." I asked what exactly was wrong, and was told "it's the motherboard, something's loose on the motherboard." They wouldn't tell me what exactly, but asked me to pay them $80 to fix it. I said that I could replace the $50 motherboard myself, and the guy started saying "oh, but there could be a lot of other things wrong, and we can't say what else there is until we go through a full diagnosis." After a bunch of back and forth, I was promised that if they couldn't "fix it" then I'd have my money back. At the time, work was consuming my life and I had brought my machine in because I didn't have time to look at it myself. So I capitulated and agreed to let them "fix" my PC with a money back guarantee if they couldn't. The guy also mentioned that a couple of the case fans were "broken" (they are sometimes super noisy) and I agreed to them replacing one on the back and disconnecting the one on the front (there are three on the front).
Fast forward two and a half weeks and I finally pick up my machine. Lo and behold, it turns on. So I pay them, take it home, and proceed to reconnect my machine to my setup. I go to connect the wifi antennae to the wifi card's port on the back (when I first built it, I rented at a place where there was only wifi). Except that there was no port. In fact, the spot where the wifi card used to be is now empty. Because whatever they did to my PC, they removed my wifi card, and never put it back in. I call them to tell them that they removed, but didn't put my wifi card back in, or in other words "there was a wifi card in there when I brought my PC in, but it isn't there anymore," and the guy tells me that if my PC won't connect to the wifi, that I should use an ethernet cord. After some additional explaining, the guy on the phone understands, apologizes because that had "never happened before," and says that my wifi card should still be "on the bench" and that I could come in the next day to pick it up. I go in person the next day to pick up the card, but the guy who's there doesn't know anything and tells me that he isn't the one who fixes computers, and that the guy who does isn't in until the next day. However, he does casually open a random drawer, pick up a random old card, and ask me if that's the one. It wasn't a wifi card that took an external antennae, so I told him no, it wasn't. I come in the next weekend, and the guy says he doesn't have my card for me because he didn't know which wifi card it was. He gives me a phone number to forward the part to, and I text him a link to the pc part picker page for it in the store. I come back the next weekend to try to pick it up, and the guy tells me he couldn't find it because he couldn't open the link I texted him. Finally, I texted him the part name and serial number, and make sure that he can read it. The next weekend I call to make sure that they have it, and I'm told that I can come in to get it. So I come in and I actually get my wifi card handed back to me as is, bare metal, not in any bag or container so that I can "put in back in [myself]."
Meanwhile, during the WiFi card fiasco, I had bought an ethernet cord extender and hooked my PC up to the internet via ethernet. So I had my gaming rig turning on, with access to the internet. Except that it would blue screen with memory related messages every 5-10 minutes, or when I opened memory intensive games. I take my PC to my friend's to help me diagnose the issue, but also because they tightened the hand screws on the case too tight to untighten without a screwdriver. So I start to unscrew the screws with a screwdriver, and while I'm at it, I notice that the side cover is actually on backwards, which puzzles me because I've erroneously tried to put it on backwards before, but it physically won't screw in backwards. As I get the screws off I realise why the cover is magically on backwards. Somebody had drilled wide the screw holes to make the cover go on backwards, so instead of being circular, the screw holes are now pill shaped. The rest of the diagnosing with my friend wasn't as exciting. We opened a bunch of applications to get the PC to crash, reproducing the blue screens I'd been getting. Swapped my ram for his on my PC, ran some benchmarking application and found that one of the sticks of ram was failing, and I now run my PC with the one remaining stick without it blue screening. read more