COOL GEEKS INC

I needed a computer fixed, I knew this was the wrong place before I even left it with them, the receptionist person was on the phone the whole time she was taking my story down, didn't write much, probably didn't hear much. But she told me the people who did the fixing would be calling me in a day or two. They didn't. So I called to see what was going on. It was business hours, I got a machine, so I left a message. Half an hour later they hadn't called back so I called the number for emergency repairs and got the geek himself. 'Oh, I thought somebody called you...' Anyhow, his story was that it's either the power supply or the motherboard, you'd try the power supply first but since it's a slimline which has a special power supply it would be expensive and hard to do, and then you might have to do the motherboard anyhow, he thinks I should just throw it out and get a new computer. So I said 'How expensive' and he didn't have a clue, when I pressed him he suggested maybe $120 for the power supply, he'd have to call around and see if he could get it at all. It's a three-year-old HP, it seemed obvious he could if he had any energy. So I said, if you had to replace both the power supply and the motherboard it would be about $240? And I'd have a computer I was used to, with my programs on it and my stuff? Whereas a new computer would be up to $600 and I'd have to set everything up and transfer it, and you think that's better? And he said, well. it must be three or four years old, something else would probably break sometime. Something else which he would not want to bother trying to fix, one imagines. Googling myself for the model of computer and 'power supply' turned up the part for $60 retail and instructions for replacing it myself. It also turned up a $5 gadget called a power supply tester which could have been used to check whether the power supply was busted or not. I would suspect that any real computer repairman would own one of those.