Complaints

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• Initial Complaint

  Date:05/05/2022

  Type:Service or Repair Issues
  Status:

  AnsweredMore info

  Complaint statuses

  Resolved:

  The complainant verified the issue was resolved to their satisfaction.

  Unresolved:

  The business responded to the dispute but failed to make a good faith effort to resolve it.

  Answered:

  The business addressed the issues within the complaint, but the consumer either a) did not accept the response, OR b) did not notify BBB as to their satisfaction.

  Unanswered:

  The business failed to respond to the dispute.

  Unpursuable:

  BBB is unable to locate the business.

  Hello, I brought my fully functioning and great running laptop computer to Alpha Geek Computers on April 14th, 2022. I only wanted the "computer professional" to clean out my fan and to determine if it was running optimally. I watched as the owner took a large magnet off of a metal filing cabinet and proceeded to degauss my hard drive and then take a commercial air compressor system to clean out the dust from my fan thereby creating static electricity which destroyed the motherboard of my computer. The computer obviously did not start and was in fact ruined with the motherboard destroyed and the hard drive wiped clean. The motherboard is the backbone that ties the computer’s components together at one spot and allows them to talk to each other. Without it, none of the computer pieces, such as the CPU, GPU, or hard drive, could interact. The owner of the business, ******* ****, told me that he possessed liability insurance and that he would contact them to cover the damage if I brought him an invoice for repair. On May 5th, 2022 I returned to Alpha Geek Computers with an invoice estimate for repair from **** ******** ***** for $618-718.00. Mr. **** told me that he will not give me his insurance company information and that he will not repair my computer. Unfortunately, I left the paper hardcopy invoice estimate for repair with Mr. **** so I cannot upload it here. It is my desire for Mr. **** to provide his liability insurance company information to cover the cost of the repairs to my computer. If he has no insurance (if he was lying) then I would like him to cover the cost of repairs personally. Thank you.

  Business Response

  Date: 06/07/2022

  On April 14, 2022.  A customer comes in to shop and tells me that his laptop seems to be overheating and running slow. He asked if I could possible clean out his fan on the laptop. I said ok, we will see what can be done. I proceeded to get the air compressor ready and prepare to clean the laptop. The laptop was running at this time and I prepared to shut it down to perform the service. This service involves removing the bottom cover of the laptop to get into inspect the fan. I start to remove the bottom cover of the laptop which requires the removal of a few screws. I am able to remove all but a couple of screws. I see that these screws are a little bit hard to remove as they were not coming out of the holes in the cover. So, I get a small shielded magnet that I keep for removing the screws. I hold this next to a small screwdriver to assist in the removal of these screws. (Note: this is a very small and shielded magnet and was applied to screwdriver to assist in retrieving screws.) I have used this many times as it is not powerful enough to affect the hard drives in any way.  I then carefully used the compressed air to blow the dust out of the fan / heat sink assembly. Then I brought the laptop back to the bench. After placing the laptop on the bench I tried to turn it on to check fan operation. At this time the computer did not start. I then started a no start trouble shooting procedure.

  Here are some of the troubleshooting steps taken, none of which got the laptop back up and running:

  1. Took the battery connector out and held the power button. Put the battery connector back in and tried turning it on. (Hard Reset)

  2. Took out the battery and kept the ac adaptor charging cord plugged in and tried turning it on.

  3. Removed the ram and hard drive and then reseated them and tried turning it on.

  At this time nothing else had been done to this computer. While working to restart this computer I noticed that I had another computer of the same model on the bench. It had been bought in for a similar problem in that it was dead with same symptoms. I thought that this seemed odd. This other dead computer was brought in by a different customer earlier on this day.

  I removed the hard drive from the machine and put it in a drive adaptor so that I could see the customer’s data to possibly transfer it to another computer. I attached the drive adaptor to my desktop office computer. The drive came up but seemed to be missing the data partition. I showed the customer the error message. It seems like the hard drive was missing the OS partition, this is the one that contains the windows program and data files. It seemed like something had corrupted the OS partition. This was also the problem on the other customer’s machine. However it had a SSD (Solid State drive) this machine had a conventional mechanical drive. Both of these machines had the same motherboard.

  Magnetism and Hard drives

  Older hard drives store date magnetically on spinning platters. However, they are not as fragile as everyone thinks they are. Small magnetic fields will not instantly destroy them or cause issues. A large field from an electromagnet will. I have a large field electromagnet in my shop( its original purpose was as a video tape eraser.) I have used this to destroy a hard drive. It takes quiet a lot to remove data. If we erase a hard drive it will remove all of the partitions rendering it non- bootable it will not remove just one partition. Even holding a small magnet near a hard drive during assembly and disassembly doesn’t cause that type of issue. This issue is usually caused by a motherboard failure.

  Since I couldn’t do anything more with his existing machine and customer stated he needed a computer for his work I did something I don’t normally do as he was an instructor for army training I offered him a temporary loaner from my sales stock with a external drive to use. These machines are already setup with most of the standard software that would be needed for normal use. (******** ******, Etc.) The external drive would be to store the files temporarily. Also, he would be able to keep this external drive if he had wanted to.

  After the customer left, I did some research on this problem as I had encountered it twice that day. I was able to find information on defects with this model of motherboard that was used in these machines. It seems that ** has known of the defect it causes data loss on hard drives along with the no boot issue.

  When the customer came back in I told him of this gave him a print out of this information and told him to contact ** to see about getting an RMA (Return Materials Authorization) for possible replacement of his computer by **. This would be because of the defects. .

   

  We have a sign posted in the store that states:

  “We Will Not Be Held Responsible For Loss or Damage Due To Equipment Failure Beyond Our Control. This Includes Units That Fail While Being Repaired.”

   

  We did not charge the customer for cleaning of his computer as this is provided as a courtesy service for all of our customers. We also provided additional diagnostics at no charge.

   

   

  Thank You,

  ******* ****