This is officially the time of year we service the most student owned machines. Yup, all the kids are home from college so they can afford to be without them for a bit to have repairs done correctly. Following are 6 of the most common repairs we perform over the summer.
- Virus removal. Even if the computer was at an on-campus shop for a virus removal, I can almost guarantee it will have more. College run shops see such a high volume of repairs they can’t take the time to remove all threats, they simply take out the obvious problem and move on. The tech department at my daughter’s college told me they spend about 20 minutes per machine. We spend about 3-4 hours.
- Software Upgrades. College kids simply don’t have the time to upgrade their computer. Many times they’ll procrastinate upgrades because the priority is getting school work out of the way. The latest Windows 10 upgrade came out during finals week, a time when term papers and projects are due. Hmmm, school work or waiting an hour or two for the Windows or OSX upgrade to finalize?
- Hard drive replacement. Most people don’t think of replacing a hard drive until it shows signs of failure. Waiting too long to replace a drive runs the risk of losing data, including school work and pictures. Many families opt to replace the drive in a college computer annually because the drive can generally be duplicated to a new with zero data, program or settings loss. Currently, the trend is swapping out mechanical drives for solid state which adds speed and durability.
- Screen replacements. Long before thin laptops and ultrabooks hit the shelves, we repaired very few screens compared to today. Now we’re fixing many screens because they’re simply more fragile. Screens break for many reasons and many repair shops don’t stock them because there’s too many variations. Summer is a great time to have the screen repaired because students can be without for a couple days until the part arrives.
- Keyboard replacements. “Dad, something (a beer or mixed drink, okay?) may have spilled on my keyboard.” I may have heard this first hand. Many kids suffer with sticky or failed keys because they don’t want to admit they were eating or drinking around their computer. The reality is that most students have to eat around their computer and mistakes happen especially when they’re tired (or tipsy).
- Memory upgrades. Many times, especially for older students, they purchased their laptops during the summer prior to their freshman year. At that time it probably was adequate for most tasks. A couple years later and the memory the computer shipped with simply isn’t adequate for the current grind. Memory upgrades are a fairly common summer repair that has a huge impact on productivity.
I’m now knee deep in almost 6 years of tuition payments between my two daughters and can well appreciate the value of repairing stuff rather than replacing.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can read past articles at www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)