As you can see from the picture above, my laptop recently broke and I had to pay out £60 to get my laptop repaired. I work in Central London at Tottenham Court Road near Oxford Street. This area is renowned for being expensive, so this would have been the last place to go to get my laptop repaired. I, however, had no choice but to go to Oxford Street as I work near there and any other alternative, like going to Stratford for example, would have been too difficult and monotonous.
What did I do to get my laptop repaired?
Oxford Street has many computer or laptop repair shops and the fact there are so many of these types of shops allows you to pick the best shops and this allows you to not have to rely on a single quote and you can shop around to see who will offer you the best price.
I think I visited around 3 computer repair shops and had offers that ranged from £40 to £100. Of course, the thing you shouldn’t do is give in to the first offer that you find. I almost made that mistake until the idea of going next door or down the road to another repair shop came to mind.
The first quote
I first got an offer for £40 and the only reason I didn’t take that offer was because he said he’d fix it by tomorrow and he would not be able to fix the cause or rather he would only fix the immediate problem. That was simply soldering the wire that became detached from the charger port. Instead of paying someone to do this I could have done it all by myself and bought the equipment to do it. I respectfully declined and said I’d look elsewhere for a cheaper quote and for someone that would do an all-rounder in fixing the whole problem meaning that I would not get persistent issues in the future.
The second quote
This is the funny yet disturbing one. I walked in and I immediately asked the person behind the counter if they did laptop repairs, he said yes and referred me to another guy behind another counter. I went over to him and asked him whether he would charge me for simply looking at my laptop’s issue. He said yes, and I tried explaining to him that if I showed him the issue that it wouldn’t take too long and that I would choose his shop to fix my problem if he thought he could repair it. Instead, he kept insisting that I pay £50 upfront for him to look at it and that if he could repair it, he would only charge me £40 to repair the issue, bringing the total amount that would’ve been paid to £90. I said no, and then he started going full-retard by telling me how many customers that he had yesterday. He was almost trying to imply that he didn’t need me. Either way, I’m so glad that I didn’t pick him.
The last and best quote
I thought I’d save the best till last and this was definitely the most straightforward out of the laptop repair shops that I went to. First of all, he addressed things like a professional. While the others immediately stated how much I was going to pay, the guy in this shop asked me to look at what needed repairing and then quoted me a price. This is basic sales 101, which the other repair shops disregarded altogether. It seems that they purely wanted the money and made it quite obvious which is a huge mistake on their part. It’s the reason why I chose this shop over the others.
A big shout out to this store! Apparently their store is called “WORLD” and I don’t think they have a website; otherwise, I would have linked to them.
And finally, my laptop is now working and it seems they done a good job on fixing the issue at hand. I will still have to buy superglue to glue down the corner part where they had to replace the charger port, so they haven’t fully fixed it. However, I’m just glad that I now have a laptop that is in full working order. I’m still working on saving up for a new laptop — that is however work in progress.
The lesson here: (tldr)
- Don’t take the first quote and definitely don’t buy into a sales pitch.
