Bringing a PC or Laptop to a shop or asking a technician to do the fix inside your house will normally incur hefty costs. By weighing some factors, you’ll be more informed if it would be a right decision for you to bring your machine to a repair shop once you started running into problems.
1. For one, the most obvious consideration is the same as with your own other appliances at home – whether it would be better to just buy brand new rather than asking it to be repaired where the cost would be more than half of the original price.
In some parts of the world, this may not be true at all as technician’s fees are much much lower than the cost of an appliance. But if you live in more developed societies, repairman’s per-hour cost is actually comparable or higher than daily paid wage earners.
If a computer repairman would charge you above $50 an hour and your unit is too old already – a dinosaur in today’s term, it would be better to get a new one. Computers nowadays, even laptops, cost dirt-cheap owing much to the number of healthy competition in the market that eventually drive down costs. This is already a far cry in the late 1980′s or early to mid 1990′s where the cost of owning a unit is like a luxury to the family.
2. You need to be aware also that some problems can be localized, I mean since your PC system includes a keyboard, a mouse, a CPU and a monitor, it maybe possible that you can salvage some parts if you want to buy brand new or one of the components is the one only having some problems.
In many cases, an LCD monitor that starts to get dimmed, it seems that it already reach it’s used-by date so that means it would be preferable to just replace the whole monitor rather than asking someone to have it fixed.
3. Computers are low-powered units. (This of course does not to mentioned the old CRT monitor where only very few people now are using it. In that case, it is not advisable to play around with the monitor itself) This means that if you have confidence of opening any electronic devices like small radio cassette, you may have so confidence opening up the motherboard by yourself (making sure of course the power is off). You may start replugging some of connections inside and look for some loose contacts that may have happen after leaving the unit uncleaned for years and years.
If you can clean the unit by itself, that would give breathing room for the fan to do its basic operation, that is to dissipate enough heat for your unit to work. You can also check the memory unit (RAM) and try to reinsert the device. If you do this, it is highly advisable to connect your body to a neutral contact e.g. a casing. Some old or even brand new RAM memory are too sensitive to static electricity your body possess to better have your hand touch a metal casing to avoid static discharge from damaging your RAM or any static sensitive devices.
Computer Repair
This may be sound odd to you just as an ordinary PC user to dare opening the motherboard. However, knowing the cost of buying a new unit and paying per hour for a computer repair, it may worth trying. What would you lose if you really planning to replace the whole unit rather than asking for a computer repair?
4. Some moisture may affect the working operation of your unit. It may be cause by liquid spill. If the problem is not too serious, you may try drying up the unit and see how it goes once you’re confident it’s already dry and clean.
It may be dreadful to open a computer unit by yourself but if you have no intention bringing it to the shop, better do some basic check and see if it helps.