PC Repair Undercover

Little Shop of Horrors

But that can-do attitude was in short supply at most repair shops. Our discovery shouldn't have come as a surprise: It's not as if poor service and repair are new. Welcome to America, where consumers find it easier to dump stuff than to get it fixed.

Half the techs at the 18 stores we visited let their imaginations run wild when diagnosing our disabled hard-drive cable problem. After jumping to wrong conclusions, they often doggedly pursued their assumptions without examining the system thoroughly enough to identify the real problem. Worse, in only 3 instances (2 Best Buy stores and 1 CompUSA outlet) did techs who misdiagnosed the problem eventually catch their mistake.

Without question, Circuit City took the prize as the least effective chain store we tested. Unlike Best Buy and CompUSA, the company doesn't fix systems at its stores at all; instead, it ships them to its centralized repair depots. But all four of our encounters with Circuit City service were failures. One store told us over the phone to bring the PC in, then refused to work on it once we arrived, claiming Circuit City did not repair systems purchased elsewhere. Another accepted the unit but then said it didn't have the information or parts to fix it. Our reporter pressed for details, and was repeatedly promised that a tech would contact him. But he heard nothing and eventually got his PC back unrepaired.

In Rhode Island, a Circuit City technician wrongly blamed our hard-disk problem on a flaky drive. But instead of compounding the error by trying to fix the machine, he advised us that the necessary repairs could cost hundreds of dollars and that it "wouldn't be fair" to us to have Circuit City do the job. (He suggested that we buy a drive at a swap meet and install it ourselves.) His Circuit City counterparts in Texas also mistakenly concluded we needed a new hard drive. We okayed that repair: a hefty $214 to install a piddling 3.2GB drive. When we got the machine home, we found a sticky note on the case reminding the technician to finish installing the software. Apparently, the tech had overlooked that memo--the new drive had DOS installed, but not Windows.

Our dealings with mom-and-pop stores truly disappointed us. Two years ago we surveyed only chains, and we wondered whether small shops, which have a solid reputation for service, could have done better. Nope. Five of the six flopped. And they seemed eager to stuff unneeded parts into our PCs. In all, two-thirds of the small stores said we needed a new motherboard or a new system.

Both the Rhode Island and North Carolina stores incorrectly deduced that our PCs had dead motherboards. The Rhode Island store ordered and installed a replacement. The other shop said it couldn't get a board to fit the Compaq's case and recommended rebuilding the PC with a combination of its own parts and new components. By the time we were through, the register rang up $295, and our desktop system had turned into a minitower.

The New Jersey independent, which made a house call to our New York location, went further. The tech decided the problem lay in a bad motherboard and possibly a corrupted hard disk (wrong); he said it would cost about $400 to get a new motherboard and fix our disk. Instead, he advised us to consider buying a new PC. His quote: $1000 or more for a system sans monitor--a price commensurate with the specs, but yikes!

Mildly good news: Unlike in our 1998 tests, no stores installed pricey parts without our prior go-ahead. Nor, as happened previously, did any techs falsely claim to have installed a new part. Give partial credit for this to our reporters, who usually asked to get the old parts back after the repair. You should always make that request, to ensure that you actually get new components.