Dave’s Electronics & Computers

To get to the point, I would give them them three stars for «downstairs», where the electronic goodies, gadgets and parts are, but barely one star for the computer repair department that lives upstairs. Since we don’t have the option of clicking half-​stars, and I can’t in good conscience dole out an overall «A-​OK», I’ve dropped the whole thing to two stars and hope that people read why.
We’ve been in several times to buy various parts, the staff was friendly, reasonably knowledgeable and helpful, sometimes they have the part and sometime they don’t, but it’s worth going in to check. OTOH, I would avoid the computer repair department! I’d always done my own PC repairs, both hardware and software, but after a couple of decades of that, was pretty much over it. So, about five years ago, we took my laptop in just to have a dead fan replaced. They replaced the fan, all right, but it also came back with some new search engine installed and the on/​off light for the onboard mouse no longer worked. Okay, not too big a deal, just a bit of an eyebrow-​raiser. I was able to get rid of the unwanted and very persistent search engine (digging around in the registry doesn’t scare me) and I can live without the mouse light, ’cause it wasn’t worth it to crack it open just to (probably/​hopefully) plug the connector back in.
Maybe a year later, one of the system files got a glitch and, because I was job hunting and needed it fixed right away, back it went. They found and fixed the problem quickly, and while it again came back with a new default search engine (which I half-​expected and was able to get rid of faster, this time) we hoped that maybe they really were okay.
The third time was the last straw. We took my mom’s laptop just for a general cleaning and speed-​up. Nothing was really wrong, it was just slow. We went to pick it up and found a corner of the case cracked as if it had been dropped from a fair height, which they failed to mention until we noticed it. The thing was dead, and they still had the nerve to hand us a bill!!! The manager ended up letting it go (ya think?) but we are NEVER again taking anything back there for repair. Like it or not, I’m once again IT Support at home.