LIFEGUARDCOMPUTERSISAMAZING! OK, so a few days ago my HP laptop, 4 years out of warranty, overheated(again) and fried its brain. A frantic search of Craigslist and eBay found no identical models to serve as parts machines, so now what can I do? My usual guru is back in Vegas, so now I have to get a local source here in Hurricane, or St. George(talk about a scary thought). The other day I noticed a new sign for computer services on State Rt. 9 in Hurricane, two blocks from my house, so I decided to gingerly test the waters and poke my head inside the place. I’m oh so glad I did. The recently opened LifeGuard Computer store in Hurricane is run by techie wizard/manager Ammon Sorden. Within seconds of describing the symptoms presented by the laptop(still hidden in my bag), Ammon said«It’s an HP, isn’t it’? How did he know that? Who is this guy, Houdini? Turns out this wasn’t Ammon’s first rodeo. He immediately gained access to the hard drive, removed it and plugged it into a desktop on his bench, and it immediately booted all the way up. Ammon pronounced my hard drive, with all its OS, applications and data, to be safe. Talk about relief! He also pronounced the remainder of the HP to be toast. Burnt toast. Guess how much Ammon charged me to diagnose my problem and test the hard drive? Nothing. Zip. Ziltch. Nada. Turns out LifeGuard’s policy is to do the majority of diagnostics FREE, and give estimates for any repairs. And what’s weirder yet, they eat any extra time repairs may take, so you never pay more than the estimate. Have you ever heard of such a thing? In the case of my HP, the repair estimate was zero, as in zero chance of reincarnation. So, the search was on for a replacement. Ammon explained one option they offer, which is to order a custom built Dell laptop(I’ve had three previous Dell products) and then further customize it themselves to meet my specific usage requirements. No «off the shelf», «one size fits all» solution here. I liked the idea, so Ammon worked up a quote with all the weird stuff I wanted on my custom/custom machine. I accepted the quote, paid him in full and he submitted the order to Dell, with delivery to be in just three days. Now for the most immediate problem. What do I do for a computer for the next few days? I’ve already been unable to get any work(or Solitaire) done for a few days, I’m deep into withdrawl. Again, Ammon had a solution. He would take the hard drive from the fried laptop, insert it into the idle desktop I have at the house, config the drive to the desktop, and abbra cadabra, I have a desktop that thinks it’s the fried laptop. Perfect! So now I could«have my laptop back» and use it until the new Dell arrived, and then Ammon would clone the old drive to the new laptop, and life would be good again. And so it went. There was a very reasonable charge for configing the laptop drive to the desktop, but cloning the old drive to the new Dell laptop would be gratis. Gratis? That’s my favorite price! I did have some minor problems with screen resolution once I got my desktop back home, so Ammon logged into my computer over the Internet, reset the resolution, and I had a fully functioning screen immediately. Cost for him to do that? You guessed it … nada. In a few days I’ll have Ammon convert all my computers to Windows 10, and make them look and function just like my beloved Windows 7. From now on, ANYTHING I need done to ANY of my computers will ONLY be done by Ammon Sorden … he’s my new trusted guru! Do yourself a favor, take all your computer problems to Ammon. He’ll fix you right up. Dean Herrington