Expert PC Repair in St. Charles, MO
We have been repairing desktop computers in St. Charles since 1996. The person who takes your machine at the counter is the same person who calls you back about it, which is not how it goes at most places anymore.
But a lot of the time you do not need to come in at all.
A large share of what we fix never leaves the customer’s desk. If the trouble is in software, and most trouble is, we connect to your computer over the internet and fix it while you sit there. No unplugging everything, no loading a tower into the car, no waiting on a callback. Call 636-442-2776, tell us what it is doing, and we will tell you straight which kind of job it is.
What We Fix
Most desktop problems fall into a short list, and after thirty years the list does not change much:
- It will not power on, or it powers on and never reaches Windows
- Random shutdowns, freezes and blue screens
- A machine that used to be fine and now takes five minutes to open a browser
- Hard drives and SSDs that are failing, clicking, or already gone
- Viruses, malware and ransomware
- Overheating, fans running full tilt, dust packed into the heatsink
- Bad power supplies, failed memory, dead motherboards
- Printers, Wi-Fi and network problems that look like computer problems
- Windows that will not update, or updated and broke something
Machines usually warn you before they quit. If yours has started acting strange, it is worth reading our list of warning signs that show up before a computer crashes. Catching it early is the difference between a repair and a data recovery. If it is already crashing, we wrote up the common causes and what to check as well.
Remote Repair Services
This is how most of our work gets done now, and it is usually the faster answer. We connect to your computer securely, you watch the entire session on your own screen, and nothing happens that you cannot see. When we are finished the connection closes.
Things we handle remotely every week:
- Email that stopped sending or receiving
- A machine that has gotten slow for no obvious reason
- Viruses, pop-ups and a browser full of things nobody installed on purpose
- Windows updates that will not finish, or finished and broke something
- Printers and network drives that disappeared
- Software that will not install, will not open, or will not license
- Setting up a new computer and moving your files onto it
- Getting backup running so the next problem is smaller
If you are elderly, housebound, working from home, or just do not want to lose an afternoon to a round trip, say so when you call. We would rather save you the drive than sell you one.
What we cannot do remotely is anything that needs hands on the hardware. A dead power supply, a failed drive, a machine that will not boot far enough for us to reach it. Those have to come in, and the next section covers what that looks like.
More on how our remote support works.
In-Shop Repairs
Walk in during business hours. No appointment, and there is parking right out front.
Your machine gets checked in on a ticket at the counter and you leave with the number, so it is tracked from the minute it hits the bench. We do not repair machines while customers wait. A rushed look in a waiting room is how things get missed, and it is worth nothing to you.
We diagnose it, then someone calls you with what is actually wrong and what fixing it costs. Nothing gets repaired before you agree to it. Diagnostic time is billable here, and you will know what the look costs before you hand the machine over. We are not running the free estimate that gets earned back inside an inflated repair bill.
If the machine is not worth repairing, we will say so and tell you what we would buy instead.
One-on-One Tech Sessions
Sometimes the machine is fine and the problem is that nobody has ever shown you how the thing works. Book a session and one of our techs will sit down with you and go through whatever you want to go through, at whatever pace you want to go through it.
Before It Breaks
The repairs that hurt are the ones where the hardware is replaceable and the photos are not. A drive can be swapped in an afternoon. Twenty years of pictures cannot.
If you are not backing anything up right now, start with the folders that actually matter. It takes an evening and it is the single cheapest thing you will ever do for your computer. We also set up backup that runs on its own if you would rather not think about it again, and that one we can set up remotely.
Office PCs
A broken PC in an office is not one problem, it is one person not working. That is the main reason we lean on remote support for business customers: nobody has to carry a machine anywhere and the person is usually back to work the same morning.
Most of our business customers stop calling about individual repairs once they are on managed IT, because we see the drive failing before they do. We also build desktops and workstations to order when a repair is not the right answer, which for a business is more often than people expect.
Where Our Customers Drive In From
When a machine does have to come in, most of them come from close by. We see a steady stream out of St. Charles, St. Peters, O’Fallon and Wentzville, plus Florissant and the rest of St. Louis. Those pages cover the drive and what happens when you walk in.
Remote support has no drive attached to it at all, so if you are further out than that, it makes no difference to us where you are.
Call 636-442-2776 or bring it by. 1475 Fairground Rd. Suite 118, St. Charles, MO 63301.