PC Repair Undercover

How Long Can You Live Without Your PC?

Want to live without your business or home PC for days or weeks on end? Neither do we. That's why speed of repair is second only to a correct diagnosis in our book.

The roadrunner repair prize goes to CompUSA: Three of four locations we tested had the machine back to us within a day. True, that included the store that misdiagnosed the problem and advised us we needed a new motherboard--even the tech said the quoted $627 (from the store's price guide) was too high. The fourth CompUSA store took about ten days but fixed it right.

Best Buy was nearly as fast. Three Best Buy stores also turned our PC around in 24 hours or less--though only two fixed the cable problem correctly--but the fourth outlet needed a mind-numbing 36 days. We could have built a new PC in less time.

Almost all of the mom-and-pop stores were slow--half of them took seven days or longer to complete the job. The only independent store to return the PC in less than 48 hours was also the only one that passed the test.

At Circuit City, the wait was even longer. The three stores that took the problem on needed an average of 16 days to return the PC.

Worse, our reporters encountered some service procedures that were inefficient at best. CompUSA drew the ire of three of four reporters, who cited trouble reaching the service department and having to trot between service and checkout areas to prepay for the repair. The Rhode Island Best Buy that held on to our PC for over a month kept us poorly informed, too, telling us little of substance when we called for status updates. And two promised callbacks from that store never came.

Most independent shops communicated well. But a California store didn't call us back; another showed scant interest in doing the repair. "They seemed to be put out at having to help a customer," said our Texas reporter, who was told that fixing the PC might take a week, despite the store's advertised promise of same-day service.

Phone Help: Not Much Better

If no service center or mom-and-pop store is nearby, you can try punching numbers on the phone. Phone support is worth considering in other instances, too, since a good technician should be able to grasp the gist of the problem and walk you through a fix. If the fix works, the typical cost for fee-based phone support--around $25 per incident--is a good deal. But only 6 of the 13 stores that offered tech support by phone provided good service for our video-driver problem.

The brightest spot was CompUSA, whose techs nailed the problem two out of four times. A third made the right call--and provided the diagnosis free--but failed to walk us through a correct fix. Even at CompUSA, however, we ran into lousy advice. One of its techs told us, "I'm 99 percent certain you'll have to reinstall Windows." If that didn't solve the problem, he said we'd need a new motherboard. Talk about jumping to conclusions.

Even more disturbing, some phone techs simply refused to lend a hand. That reaction was understandable at Circuit City, since its policy is not to work the phones. But how do you explain the response at Best Buy? Though the voice menu at that company's toll-free number clearly mentions a $25 per incident support option, its reps rebuffed us repeatedly, claiming no such support was available. Our reporters persevered, however, and two of the four eventually reached a technician and got help.

Not surprisingly, many independent mom-and-pop shops can't afford to provide full-fledged phone support, and as a result they decline to offer any. But in the five cases where we managed to enlist small-shop technicians' guidance over the phone, only two of the advisors solved the problem correctly.

All told, we had somewhat better results with phone support than with drop-off service. But the experience still left us disheartened. If your tech support encounters are like ours, you may need to assert yourself somewhat aggressively just to convince a service department to tackle your problem. And once you do convince someone to help you troubleshoot your cranky computer, you may end up wishing you hadn't bothered.