At some point on Tuesday my computer went haywire on me. It worked fine, if a bit slow, and I shut it down for a while. That evening when I came back I found the infamous Blue Screen of Death waiting for me. My computer crashed.

I hadn’t had a chance to back up a lot of stuff on the computer. Some of it not so important, like my 7GB+ worth of music or all of the anime episodes I’d downloaded. The thought of loosing it hurt, but I knew I could deal. Other stuff was way more important, the hundreds of fonts, my mileage log, expense log, client information, timesheets – you get the picture. What made things even worse is that I knew I couldn’t afford to get it fixed. I was estimating based on what I knew some places (like Staples and the Geek Squad) charge and I was seeing bills of $200 or more. Than I heard an interesting story.

One of the businesses that operate in the same office complex as my mother had some issues of their own. The Geek Squad came out, did a half-assed job, and then gave them a triple-figure bill. Not only were not all of the issues resolved, but the technicians left several of the computers, servers, and other devices not connected to the network and succeeded in locking them out of it too. The owners were understandably pissed off and demanded the Geek Squad return and do the job right. The Geek Squad was more than happy to comply – for a price. Rather than pay another outrageous fee they opted to contact a local business. They came out, and in one day, sorted out the mess the Geek Squad made and fixed the problem that the G.S. was supposed to have fixed to begin with. It only cost them $60 some odd dollars to do it too.

The last time I spoke to the Geek Squad I found out that their initial scan of your system, to determine the problem, costs $180. That’s three times what the other place charged to fix a major issue! The “other place” I’m talking about is PC Fix, located at 800 West Picacho in Las Cruces, NM. Computer repair starts at $29 and data recovery starts at $15. I had them recover the major items, as I really was strapped for cash and couldn’t afford to recover everything on the computer (I had several gigabytes worth of data in just the important stuff) and the guy even went through the extra trouble trouble to recover my music for me at no extra charge (even though he really should have ).

In the end I paid $62 and got my laptop back that same day. How awesome was that? Unfortunately the computer had to be restored and the hard drive reformated, hence why I lost quite a bit of stuff regardless. As such, I’ve spent the past couple of days recovering what was lost. Re-installing programs and devices, dowloading codecs, moving files where they need to be, and making backups to avoid a repeat. And don’t even get me started about installing all the required updates.

Thankfully downloading programs and installing devices and software is nowhere near as difficult [for me] as working the simplest of gps systems. Yeah, somehow I always screw those doohickeys up. There’s an unspoken rule now, if we’re lost and must navigate our way to our destination, hand the directs and a map to Joana. Give me the gps only if you actually want the little bugger to go belly-up.