Grand Opening Plans

One of my customers whom I've fixed laptops, desktosp, installed printers and wireless security cameras on the network has decided to help with planning the grand opening of the new office we opened in Columbus. I am transitioning from mobile repair service to a store and will still provide mobile service on the weekends. The grand opening will be on July 24th from 11 AM to 4 PM and we will be giving away different things and answering as many computer questions as possible.

BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202

www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901

Columbus laptop repair - Virus, spyware, bad lcd

A customer contacted me about an issue with their computer. It was only displaying in 4 & 8 bit colors. When I received the computer I saw that they had no antivirus and no spyware protection. I installed both (AVG free edition and Malwarebytes) and saw hundreds of infections. In addition, several critical windows processes/services had been disabled from the infection. After removing all the issues I reenabled the windows services that were disabled and began updating the computer to the latest revision. The customer originally came in with a burnt out lcd screen and computer running really slow and will leave with a computer that is running like it just came from the store.

BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202

www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901

Hard Drive Recovery & Freezer

Ok, this is one of my favorite stories of data recovery. I did this about a month ago and it's always a blast (when it works). I have seen this in the past and it works about 25% of the time. I had a customer that had a hard drive that had stopped spinning. This is different than other hard drive failures that create a clicking sound on the hard drive. If the hard drive is clicking you're probably looking around $1000 to get your data back, if the data recovery company can get the data. This story is different as the hard drive makes no sound at all.

The theory behind this is that the freezer cools down the hard drive bearings and makes them contract and while the hard drive is running it keeps it cool too. Hard drives run very hot and bad hard drives run even hotter. The steps to this are as follows.

1. Buy the exact same hard drive and make sure the firmware sticker on the drive matches whe bad one.

2. Replace the electronics on the bad hard drive.

3. Make sure you have some sort of hard drive enclosure that will plug into the USB and a hard drive that is big enough to copy the data to.

4. Stick the hard drive in the freezer for 24 hours.

5. Pray, pray pray and then plug the USB cable into the computer.

6. If the drive starts spinning get your data off as fast as possible starting with the most critical files and then the second most critical and so on. For windows I like using the unstoppable copier from http://www.roadkil.net/ and Apple has their own version of data recovery. Above is a picture of the data recovery done recently.

BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202

www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901