Colwell Computers

I am so knackered having had to deal with colwell computers, that I don’t have the energy to write a detailed review for this place. I love to support local businesses, but with their attitude I won’t be returning. The owner behaves like a bully and knowing very well that I had no other option, he just kept on with his bullying ways. Unless you are desperate for their service please don’t go here. You will have to pay money and then get yelled at by the business.

If you have a mac, don’t waste your time and money at Colwell Computers. I live in Saratoga Springs and thought I would save myself the trip down to the Apple Store at Crossgates Mall, and support a local business. We brought in our mac power pc tower and were told we would get a call the next day. The call never came. We had to call them (their answering machine) and then it became apparent that the only employee there was the owner, who’s priority on repairs is based on which customer complains the most about the lack of service. When he finally got back to us, he said the computer needed a new hard drive and cd/​dvd burner. When we got the mac home and hooked it up, I realized he must have used the cheapest replacement parts available. The cd/​dvd burner buzzes so loud it sounds like a model plane, and it gives an error note that it can’t read the media inserted 50% of the time we try to burn something. The hard drive has it’s own quirk, about every two minutes it makes a clicking sound, just loud enough to annoy anyone in the room. Yes, both replacement parts work, but for the price we paid we could have had top rated parts from the Apple Store. Next time I’ll just make the trip down to the Apple Store.

My teenager stuffed a laptop under his mattress for reasons that I won’t go into here, and when it was extracted in the morning the screen was just a bunch of random lines. Took it to Colwell and they did a diagnostic and said the system was hosed but that was because it was trying to boot the screen which wouldn’t boot, so I paid them $ 200 in advance to replace the screen.
Six weeks later, after various explorations, they informed me that my computer was a paperweight. The gentle massage of my teen’s body had fried the motherboard with the screen laughably intact.
So why am I giving them four stars when they didn’t fix my computer? Because they were totally honest with me, patient in trying to fix the problem, and refunded my money in full when it didn’t work out. They even let me toss the piece of junk in the electronic recycling out front.
It’s rare to find a jack-​of-​all-​trades computer repair store in these days of plug-​and-​play, rip-​and-​replace, but these guys seem like the real deal.