4 broken laptops

Had a few calls from several customers yesterday. 3 were existing customers and 1 was a new one.

The first customer had a computer that was brought into the shop after another company had sold her a defective hard drive. After determining she had a bad drive I told her to go get her money back. She said she wanted to try to install the hard drive herself after getting another one and was going to install the operating system too. What she really needed help with was installing the necessary drivers for her computer and to get the files that she had backed up before the hard drive failed back onto the laptop.

The 2nd customer had a virus on his computer that has been going around since about June of 2009 under a variety of names. Basically, he was locked out of his computer and couldn't run any programs. Been seeing a lot of these.

The 3rd customer brought his computer in a while ago and was running out of space on his computer so the hard drive will possibly need backed up, wiped clean and have everything reinstalled.

The 4th customer had a water spill on his computer and it won't turn on. Could be coincidental that he has a bad DC power jack but unlikely. This will probably take a complete mobo(motherboard) replacement.



BRM Laptop Repair
3171 N. High St.
Columbus, OH 43202
www.BRMLaptopRepair.com
laptop.repair@gmx.com
614-313-9901

Columbus Laptop Repair - Grand Opening

Well we just had our grand opening last weekend. We had a lot of traffic both from previous customers and new customers passing by. 4 people dropped off laptops for service and we handed out a lot of business cards to potential customers.

Currently working on a couple of Toshiba's with cracked screens and some software issues. One customer just bought the computer on Saturday and their grandson somehow got a virus on the computer. since it was still fresh out of the box the most economical solution for this customer was to do a factory restore.

I'm really busy with laptops I got from over the weekend and am playing catchup on computers right now but I guess that's a good problem to have.

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

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

Columbus Laptop Repair - Event & iMac Repair

Yesterday I attended the annual event called picnic with the pups at CHA who I do small business consulting for. It was a great time and I had a lot of people coming over and asking computer questions and checking if I could come out on an appointment.

I've got a customer's iMac in for repairs right now. It appears the operating system was corrupted somehow and it couldn't boot into a normal mode. I archived all the files after determining the hard drive was ok and then loaded the operating system. I'm currently moving all of the archived files to an external drive. The files that were archived were not accessible so I had to copy and mount to an external hard drive to eliminate the permissions on the files.

I imagine next week will be even busier with so many people asking for help with the computers at the event.

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

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

Columbus laptop repair - MSI netbook, HP Laptop

Had a customer come in with an MSI netbook the other day telling me it was running slow when connecting to the internet and she wasn't able to use it to access her online college class from Columbus State. The problem was that McCaffee Internet Security had downloaded itself when she upgraded Adobe and caused all sorts of problems since Norton Internet Security was also on her system. The problems were too numerous that were created and it was easier and more econmical for the customer to just get everything restored to factory condition. I had another customer who has an HP laptop that is overheating and shutting down. It has caused numerous operating system errors too because it would shut down while trying to boot. I imagine this computer will probably need a good cleaning and the operating system reloaded as the errors he has described are indicative of the operating system itself has been corrupted.


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

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

Columbus laptop repair - wireless printer sharing

A customer was dealing with a printer issue. The original idea was to have the printer connected to a desktop computer and set up as shared so other computers with access to the network could print to it. The person who originally set up the printer had forgotten to share the printer and set up the correct port for it. The fix took about 20 minutes to remedy. After setting it up I checked if I could print from one of the laptops on the network to make sure everything was working ok.

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

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

Computers, Desktops & Laptops Oh my...

This week has been an interesting week already. I will be working on a desktop computer that is a Compaq Presario this week that keeps randomly shutting down. Sounds like an overheating problem since it is shutting off after a couple of hours of running every time. Also have a Dell Studio laptop in the pipeline that will need a screen replaced. This one's a little unique in that it has a HD LCD on it which tends to be a little pricier than normal.

Last week I picked up a couple of laptops that both had a bad DC power connector. The first was a HP that also needs a new screen, battery and the customer also wanted a memory upgrade. The other laptop had a hard drive going bad in it so data recovery was needed too. Disassembly of those types of laptops are always fun as there's a lot of electronics crammed into a little space. The last one I picked up last week was an acer that had picked up a virus. I was able to use my favorite tool, CCleaner, to help clean that laptop up. From the same customer location I picked up an SD card that was accidently formatted and had vaction videos from Disneyland on it. I really enjoyed being able to drop off a DVD that had the recovered videos and making another customer extremely happy about getting their data back.

Last week was a busy week and this one doesn't look like it's going to slow down at all. Looking forward to a couple of screen replacements and another power connector replacement.


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

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

Back up and blogging

Well, back to blogging about the repairs again. I just finished a huge project for an animal shelter that involved converting the entire network from hardwired to wireless and installing network cameras saving video feed to dedicated hard drive storage.

I'll be returning a gateway, dell and hp computer to their owners today. The gateway had a bad power cord, the dell a bad inverter and the hp needed a new dc power connector.

I will then be picking up a compaq for a fan replacement, a hard drive for data recovery and I have another dell in the shop for a power connector replacement. Looks like a busy weekend.

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

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

Hijacked Computer & Bad Hard Drive

Had a client yesterday that had laptop and desktop issues. Both computers were Dell machines. The laptop had been hijacked by an application that had installed itself and prevented the user from doing anything after booting into windows. This is the 3rd customer that I've seen have this problem this week. The program stated that the computer was infected and that 30+ infections were found and if you did anything it shuts down the application you try to access. It's a front for getting your credit card number and doing even worse damage than was done to the laptop so be very careful if you have this. Each computer behaved a little differently and took different measures to remove the application.

The desktop was a no brainer. I used a USB stick that had an operating system(Ubuntu) loaded on it and was able to make sure all the hardware worked. When trying to install an operating system on the hard drive though, the hard drive just spun and made no progress. After further testing in my office it was verified the hard drive went bad.



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

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

3 laptops

Recently had a customer come all the way from Mansfield with 3 laptops that he needed assistance with. 2 of the laptops are HP DV6000 models that have different problems with them. His exact words were "found you on the net - was looking for the Toshiba laptop warranty repair place off polaris but you seem well recommended", pretty cool.

The third laptop is a Toshiba and has some problems with overheating.

1 HP has an issue with the power button, still trying to narrow that one down. The other has problems getting past POST(Power On Self Test). Will be looking at that one soon.

Had 2 customers recently have a pop up on their screen when booting into Windows that says they have some virus on their computer and that it is being removed/quarantined/locked down by an antivirus program that they did not install after the Windows splash screen disappears.

The first computer I saw this on had Windows Vista and was salvaged after opening task manager, killing the process, uninstalling a program that had installed itself and rolling back Vista to a month before the attack.

The second computer had XP Home and was not so lucky. Task manager was inaccessible thanks to the attack and the program hid itself when booting into safe mode. On top of that, the Add/Remove programs was disabled. Probably could've targeted specific points and eliminated the problem but it would've taken much more time and labor doing this approach rather than backing up the data(scanning backed up data for infections of course) and blasting the operating system.



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

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

HP Laptop, HP Netbook, Apple MacBook Pro

Been about a couple of weeks since my last blog here in Columbus, Ohio. Been really busy, here's of the highlights of some of the laptops I've worked on since my last blog.

A traveling comedian was here in Columbus and had an HP netbook that was bogged down with some viruses and spyware. Not really sure how I feel about netbooks yet. They're great for quick lookups on the internet and fit in the purse or bookbag but but so do most of the smartphones on the market. The have a large solid state drive on them but don't expect them to be as powerful as their larger laptop counterparts. Kind of limited on storage so if you're looking to keep music, video or pictures on them you may want to consider external storage mediums when you purchase one. In any case, a quick loading of Ad-Aware & AVG and several Windows updates later this guy was back in business and telling jokes.

The next customer had an Apple MacBook Pro that had met with root beer and believe it or not the laptop won. This particular Apple laptop had 4 wide electrical tape covering the bottom of the entire keyboard tray protecting the motherboard against anything spilled into the laptop. The customer was very fortunate that Apple had designed this laptop so well. That being said, it still took almost a complete disassembly of the laptop to clean up all traces of the frosty beverage. Be careful if you eat or drink around your laptop, they don't like to get wet.

The last laptop I'll be talking about was a mess. This customer had taken her laptop to Geeksquad and contacted HP support about it. I've had many customers have regrets about this very type of thing because they think they're going to get great support and they have no way of knowing if the guy or gal behind the counter or on the other side of the phone is someone just out tech school our an experienced IT consultant with many years of experience. In my experience with customers, it's usually the former based on them coming to me after the service provided to them. In any case, this customer had quite a few issues going on with her laptop. She initially had called me because she couldn't print or get on the internet through Internet Explorer. Upon closer examination, I had found that the customer service she had contacted before had used remote login programs to access her computer and had failed to remove software or instructed her how to do so when finished. I also had found that they had disable several critical system processes that prevented her computer from updating Antivirus, Antispyware and Window's update. The system event log files I examined showed many, many conflicts with the Remote Login feature that was installed. The customer service had also installed many, many startup programs and screwed up her printer drivers by doing a partial install of her printer software and telling her to shut the computer off in mid stream. NEVER shut off a computer in the middle of installation of anything, especially hardware. There are many, many things happening accessing window's system files and you are guaranteed to screw things up. I managed to get her computer up and running to a tolerable condition in my opinion. I also asked when her business would have some downtime so that I could do a complete system restore on her computer since there were many other issues going on and I still could not get the USB controllers to behave properly. In short, just because you have a warranty with your laptop and wherever you bought it from does not mean they're going to fix it or make things better. I'm not trying to sell myself but I let my work speak for itself, give me a call and I'll give you an honest and fair assesment of your computer. Happy Easter everyone.


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

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