PC repair... the going rate

hiya rdsantos welcome to MyLot!
I've never met him before so don't know if he's trustworthy or not, but it's a chance I have to take due to financial circumstances. I'm haggling over the price, don't worry... I thought he was charging OTT and I'm haggling over it in email lol. It would be too heavy for me to take to him for repair and I would feel more comfortable in my own home and having it repaired there I can keep an eye on him and see what he's doing lol.
It's a pity you live so far away, I'd have given you the job!

that's a good move thea09.

Good morning Thea
£30 seems a lot when you don't know exactly what time and parts are spent on it!
Hopefully a response might come up with a solution but this local lad has said that it sounds like the OS needs reinstalled. the problem.. It was previously trying to reboot then got stuck on the windows error recovery screen. When I switched off then on again.... nothing but periodic beeps Thanks thea, I hope I can come to a mutual price agreement with him rather than attempting to repair it under instruction!

Just a thought Alice but it does sound similar to what I was told was needed and STvasile has clear instructions on one of my discussions if you don't mind trawling back. It was on 'Help needed setting up email' - in the middle of that I said the other lap top was infected. Might be worth having a look back, about a month old I'd say.

Oh and don't forget what a techniphobe I am and I managed to fix it under instruction, really. Much easier than copy and paste.

I'll take a look thea thanx if a technophobe like you can do then maybe I can!

I've just gone through your 17 pages and couldn't find it hon search not bringing it up either... it wasn't deleted was it?

I'll look for it Alice, I thought the quickest way would be to look through strongheart's replied as knew he was having trouble getting on line recently but had answered but he appears to have gone. Will look.

Found it, sorry can't copy/paste link as you know Alice.

Page 8 of started discussions 'Advice on setting up a new email address '

Second response in box 6 by stvasile.

Hope it is of some use.

Thank you very much Thea.. you're a STAR hugs* x

Just sorry it was no use to you. At least I know where the instructions are now if I get infected again.

LOL I wish it was just a wee infection I had thea

hiya Cat
You're right! it's not a fun decision to make but I had a desktop before and the same thing happened and I just wrote it off I'm sure if I asked about, I could find someone to do it, but I only asked my daughter who thought she knew someone but they were just into telecom repairs. I just want a quick, cheap and hassle free solution.
My wording has you confused...apologies. When I said 'possibly repair' I meant whether I have it done or not, because I may just sell it if it's going to cost too much. lol@ bank encoding, who knows aih!

Ohhh my GOD, $300 for reformatting.Man he made you a fool. I used to do this for free sometimes and sometimes i charge if i relly need some money in my college PC and friend's PC.
Man $300 is a good amount.In our country you can actually buy a netbook with that amount.
Well i think £40 is a quite good amount if there is some hardware failure.
I just OS problem then that price is also high.

Hi harpreet89, he sure did make a fool of me. This incident was a few years ago and I have since reformatted my computer and my sister's on more than a few occasions and it is not that complicated to do, just time consuming but not worth $300, that's for sure!

hiya Paula
I agree with both you and harpeet, that was a rip off! There are some unscrupulous bar stewards out there even that $25 call out charge was crappy.
I guess a total of £40 isn't too bad but when I'm on jobseekers allowance it's a lot, so if I can cut him down to £20/£25 it would be better, plus he would still be earning right? I probably could do without the files, I've got my pics and music backed up so not too worried. When we lose things it's said we don't realize what we've lost till it's gone, and that also means the unnecessary thngs! lol
I can't get it to boot at all, it's making these intermittent beeps

Definitely try to get him to charge you less if you can, for sure. At least it doesn't sound like he's trying to rip you off... Good luck with it Alice, hope it all gets fixed for the best price for you!

I think that's why I have stuck with him for the time being Paula, because he sounds ok and the original price isn't as extortionate as some of them out there! I'll wait and hear what he has to say to my haggling lol.

hiya gabs
I once went to a computer course but it looked all too complicated for me and I lasted 2 days lol, I just don't have a techy side. I reckon he's playing on my desperation to see if I will fall for it, but I'm negotiating lol. If he's a student like he claims then he'll take every penny he can get right?
I don't know anybody hon so will just have to scout around and see if I can get a decent price. Thanks for the support though and the offer to help if we were closer. hugs*

hiya Tony
I have been into a couple of shops with my brother when my last desktop went kaput! and heard a few quotes given to the customer in front of me... my brother and I looked at each other and walked out of the shop! I suppose his charge isn't too bad, but I'll try and see if I can cut him down a wee bit.

hiya harpreet
It seemed fine until a few days ago when I was using the scanner to scan some old photos and the next day it jut went bonkers! It first said that there were some hardware issues, which I suspected might be the printer/scanner, but didn't understand it because it is compatible with vista and I've used it before without problem.
When I next booted up it said it was needing to reboot which I did, but it switched itself off! I then switched on again, but it wouldn't move past the error recovery screen, so I switched off again. Last time I tried to switched it on all I got was a flashing red light accompanied by periodic beeps.

hiya Tora hugs*
Please see the response above for what happened.
It's not too important about the files I can live without them, but it's vista and I wasn't supplied with a restore cd. same applies to my laptop. Even if I had that option the dvd drive isn't reading anything anyway. I've looked on line into help for that and have downloaded img burn and downloaded vista recovery iso file and was intending doing a boot from a usb flash drive but not quite sure what I'm doing or even if the pc has that bootable option
I'm hoping the lad I've been in touch with will drop his price a bit, if he's out of work (a student) then I may get lucky. It was his hourly rate that baffled me.. £15 per hour is quite a lot considering the minimum wage is only £5 odds lol.

Whoops, I completely missed that!

The symptoms you described sound almost exactly like what happened to my laptop when my hard drive failed. I put the computer into hibernate mode, then when I went to boot it again it came up with the Windows restore screen and told me that something had been corrupted. It wouldn't do anything after that, and I couldn't reformat it because the problem was caused by a mechanical malfunction. I ended up having to buy a new hard drive to get my computer up and running again.

You may be able to contact your computer's manufacturer and get them to send you a set of the recovery discs you need. They aren't bundling the CD's with computers anymore because they're creating recovery partitions instead--but those only work if the recovery partition is intact. You should be able to create your own discs from the recovery sector, but it's a pain.

I'd find out if your lad is able to do anything about mechanical problems with the drive. If not, will he charge you for his time if he's unable to fix your computer?

I'm not quite sure Tora, I'll have to discuss things more with him, not being able to repair it wasn't brought up because he seemed quite confident. I'm feeling a bit dubious now! Maybe I'd be better scrapping it.

hiya Shirley
Those call out charges are ridiculous! Like one of the previous responses was unfortunate to experience, they can just come out, take a quick look and say it's irreparable then still charge the call out fee! Thanks for responding

hiya smacksman
It's vista and no discs I do back up my data but not often enough to save everything, but I do have the majority of my pics and all of my music. I'm not too bothered about the rest, settings, software and some unimportant documents and I've got all my passwords in my head so a complete restore would be ok. Well I guess if yu charge £25 per hour then his charges must be very reasonable according to the going rate. Thanks for responding and the info about what PC world can do too...although that option is out of the question.

The good thing about Vista is that you could have made a copy of your pc onto DVDs when your pc was working ok. It is a 'one-off' backup using software by the pc manufacturer.

I know in your case it is unfortunately too late but I add this for other readers who might not have done it yet.

The option of a backup shows up when the pc is first switched on after purchase and naturally, not many users have a spare set of blank DVD's to hand at that time.

From what you have said in your replies above it might be worth getting someone to test your power supply unit. If that is faulty then a new PSU from an online pc components supplier like www.ebuyer.com is under £20 and easy to fit. I have a PSU tester that takes the 20 pin plug on the PSU and checks all the voltages are ok. One red light and you know the PSU is duff.

Fiddling with pc's without original discs is very time consuming to recover data from the old hard drive (if possible) and to download megabytes of driver files for your motherboard to get your sound, USB, graphics, ethernet, etc. all working after a disk wipe. And of course a new copy of Vista will set you back £60 plus.

Sometimes it is cheaper to buy a new box for £300

Thanks for that smacksman.. informative but disheartening lol
I should've made a back up but didn't I don't suppose a back up on a flash drive of my laptop would work would it? CD/DVD drive isn't picking up anything either. I downloaded img burn and downloaded vista recovery iso file but haven't attempted to do anything yet until I get a 4gb pen...would that work?

That should work. Hit Del or F2 as your pc starts to get into the BIOS and then page across to wording like 'Boot Sequence', 'Boot Order' or something like that and with a recent BIOS you should see USB as an option. F10>Y for yes should then save your options and get you booting.

That assumes you have just lost your boot sector on your hard drive and are getting your pc to go through BIOS start up and goes to the 'blue screen of death' and will read your memory stick. If it is your PSU, motherboard, cpu, RAM or some other component that has died then you may not get to booting from anything.

Good luck. It will be an education for you if you are prepared to work it through.

It is not rocket science and you are quite clever enough to do it yourself if you are prepared to research the possible problems and take the time to do it.

I have confidence in you

That should work. Hit Del or F2 as your pc starts to get into the BIOS and then page across to wording like 'Boot Sequence', 'Boot Order' or something like that and with a recent BIOS you should see USB as an option. F10>Y for yes should then save your options and get you booting.

That assumes you have just lost your boot sector on your hard drive and are getting your pc to go through BIOS start up and goes to the 'blue screen of death' and will read your memory stick. If it is your PSU, motherboard, cpu, RAM or some other component that has died then you may not get to booting from anything.

Good luck. It will be an education for you if you are prepared to work it through.

It is not rocket science and you are quite clever enough to do it yourself if you are prepared to research the possible problems and take the time to do it.

I have confidence in you

I wish I had that much confidence in myself... I certainly don't want to make things worse, but will give it a go! It will only cost around £7 for a 4gb flash drive on ebay which is a thing that is always useful, so nothing to lose and a little experience/knowledge gained. If it doesn't work I can call in the troops lol
Cheers for all your advice, I'll let you know how it goes.