Design mockup. The shop shown here is invented, and the phone number, address and prices are placeholders.
Cold Boot · computer repair · Liberty, Missouri · since 2002
Every repair shop publishes an hourly rate. Nobody publishes the answer to the question people actually have at the counter, which is whether a nine year old laptop is worth another two hundred dollars.
Hours, and what to bring ↓
So this is an index of symptoms in the words people use at the door, and every entry ends in a verdict. Some of them say no.
Nothing at all. No light, no fan, no noise.$0 – $180
Usually the power supply on a desktop or the charger brick on a laptop, and the diagnosis is free because it takes four minutes with a known-good spare. About one in five turns out to be the wall socket or a failed surge strip, and that one costs you nothing.
Bring it in. Cheap to find out.
Fans spin, screen stays black.$95 – $260
Either the screen, the cable to the screen, or the graphics chip. The first two are worth doing on almost anything. The third is a soldered part on most laptops, which means the whole board, which is where the price stops making sense on a machine over five years old.
Depends which of the three. Free to determine.
Turns on, hangs on the maker's logo forever.$110 – $190
Nearly always a failing drive. Recoverable, usually with the files intact, and it is the single most common job on this bench. If the machine is still on a spinning hard disk, the replacement makes it faster than it was when it was new.
Fix it. Best money on the list.
Takes four minutes to reach the desktop.$150 – $210
A solid state drive and a clean install. This is not a tune-up and it is not software; a mechanical hard disk in a 2016 laptop is the bottleneck and nothing else fixes it. Machines we do this to routinely last another four years.
Fix it, even on an old machine.
Fine at first, then crawls after an hour.$85 – $120
Heat. The fan is packed with dust and felt, the paste under the processor has gone hard, and the machine is deliberately slowing itself down to stop cooking. A strip, clean and repaste, and it is a different computer.
Fix it. Also prevents the expensive failure.
Slow, and it was slow the day you bought it.—
The cheapest new laptops ship with a processor and storage that were inadequate on day one, and there is nothing inside them worth upgrading. We will tell you this for free rather than take a hundred and fifty dollars to make it slightly less annoying.
Do not fix. Put the money toward a better machine.
Clicking, roughly once a second.$180 – $600
Stop using it and unplug it now, before finishing this page. A clicking drive is a head failure in progress and every additional minute of power reduces what can be recovered. Bring it in switched off. The price range is wide because it depends entirely on how far it has gone.
Urgent. Do not power it on again.
Loud fan, constantly, like a hairdryer.$85
Same job as the one that gets slow after an hour. Dust, felt and old paste. Twenty minutes of noise reduction that also adds years to the machine.
Fix it.
Pop-ups, a changed search page, adverts inside programs.$110
Adware and browser hijacking. Removable, and the removal holds if the extensions go with it. Flat price, one day.
Fix it.
A full-screen warning with a phone number on it.$0 – $110
That is a scam page, not a virus, and there is nothing wrong with the machine yet. Do not ring the number. Hold the power button until it goes off, then bring it in and we will check whether anything was let in. If nothing was, that check is free.
Ring us, not them.
Files renamed, and a note demanding payment.$0 – $400
Ransomware. We will not pay it and we will not pretend we can undo it. What we can do is get the machine clean, tell you honestly what is recoverable from shadow copies and from any backup you have, and set up the backup that means it never matters again.
Come in. Be prepared for bad news.
Liquid on the keyboard, still working.$130 – $320
Bring it in today. Corrosion is a slow process that continues for weeks after the machine seems fine, and a board cleaned within forty-eight hours usually survives. One cleaned after a month usually does not. Rice does nothing.
Today, not next week.
Cracked screen, everything else fine.$140 – $290
A stocked part on common models, three days on anything unusual. On a machine worth less than about four hundred dollars this is a real decision and we will say so before ordering anything.
Fix it if the machine is worth more than double the repair.
Dies at forty percent with no warning.$95 – $220
A worn cell. Batteries are consumables with a four to six year life, so this is maintenance rather than a fault. Genuine parts where they exist, and we will tell you when they do not.
Fix it.
Only charges if the cable is held at an angle.$120 – $175
The charging port has come loose from the board. It is a soldering job and it will not get better on its own; the usual ending is the pad tearing off, which turns a hundred and twenty dollar repair into a board replacement.
Fix it now, not when it stops entirely.
A tablet or phone under warranty.—
Opening it voids the cover. Go to the maker first, and come back if they say no.
Not us. Not yet.
A machine older than twelve years, running slowly.—
Parts are scarce, the operating system is out of support, and anything we do is a stay of execution. The exception is when there is software on it that cannot be moved, and that exception is real and we will help with it.
Do not fix, unless something on it cannot move.
No appointment. Bring the machine and the charger. You will get a phone call with a number and a recommendation before anything is opened up, and if the recommendation is not to bother, there is nothing to pay.
