PC Repair Network

Short version: On August 29, 2014, Darrell Elliott of the PC Repair Network (www.pcrepairdallas.net) came to my house at my request to service a laptop with a broken keyboard. With my permission, Mr. Elliott took my computer and $85 as a deposit on the repair. I haven?t seen my computer, my data, or my $85 since. Longer version: I contacted Mr. Elliott after about a weekand a half to inquire about the status of my machine. He told me he would check on it and get back to me, but he never followed up. He then became unreachable?by phone, by text, by email, and through the postal service (both standard and certified mail). He simply did not respond to any of my inquiries. It was as if he had vanished. At this point, I filed a complaint with the BBB, to which Mr. Elliott did not respond. I also filed a stolen property report with the Dallas Police. A detective managed to reach Mr. Elliott. He told the detective that the computer had been stolen from him. (Note that Mr. Elliott had not bothered to share this highly important information with me.) Mr. Elliott committed to both the police and to me that hewould resolve this matter with me within a week. When that week came with no action on his part, he told me he needed a five-day extension. I did not agree to the extension, but Mr. Elliott took it anyway. He allowed that extension to come and go, however, without communicating with me. I haven?t heard from himsince. So, roughly eight weeks after I first engaged Mr. Elliott, I do not have my computer, my data, my $85, or any reason to believe that I will ever see any of them again. You can read other complaints about Mr. Elliott online. Please learn from them, and from this one.

The owner, Darrell Elliott, answered the phone when I called and after I explained in detail the issues I am having he said he could have a technician out in two hours. I asked if they guarantee their work and he assured me they do. Mr. Elliott turned out to be the repair technician. He arrived on time and proceeded to work on the computer. After approximately two minutes he told me he was certain my issues were caused by viruses on my computer that the Microsoft Security Essentials did not block. He said Security Essentials is no longer any good and then told me he could provide a new and excellent software program called Comodo for a lifetime subscription of $69.95 with lifelong support. I foolishly purchased the software and after approximately 45 minutes Mr. Elliott informed me the issue was a bad printer and not a computer issue at all although I had explained to him what was happening when I phoned him. I later found out the software he sold me is free on line! He told me I owed him $245.35 total and I gave him a credit card. He told me they do not accept credit cards and he would only take a check or cash. I told him I had not company checks and asked if I could mail him a check. He refused. I finally wrote a check out of my personal account and he requested the check be made out to him personally and not the company name. Within 10 minutes he had cashed the check. I asked him twice to leave my home office and twice he refused. He also had someone waiting for him in the car parked out front which I found possibly suspicious but that is really of no consequence. Bottom line I paid $245.35 for absolutely nothing. I have reported the scam to the local police department and they have cautioned me to close my checking account as they suspect he may make copies of the check with the routing number and account number and wipe out the account. I strongly recommend anyone not to hire this "company ."

Darrell is responsive, polite, and punctual. It was a pleasure talking with him. I wish that his visit had ended a success, but I have to be completely honest in my reviews. I had a hard drive failure. I have two drives configured in a RAID-0 for speed. Darrell changed the drive configuration so that the computer could no longer see the RAID drives. Once that was done, it could not be un-done. In short, before he came over, I had a computer that might boot up one out of 20 tries and painfully slowly, but I probably could have pulled important files off of it when time permitted. After he left, I have a computer that cannot boot at all and all the data is lost. Darrell did waive the fee for coming out which I greatly appreciated. He also offered to take my computer with him and work on it at home and try to access the data with special software. He would do that for about $150. That's a pretty good deal, and I appreciated the offer. The problem is that as nice as Darrell seems, I don't know him personally and I have a lot of tax information and other confidential and personal information on my machine which I'm not comfortable leaving with someone else. This was a tough one for me because I really liked Darrell. I marked "No" for "Would use this provider in the future", but mostly because I'm a computer professional and had called him just to save me time. The next time I'll just do it myself. If I knew someone less computer savvy, I'd feel pretty comfortable passing Darrell's card along. Update: I took my computer to a local PC repair shop near my home. The technician is the nephew of a friend of mine, so I felt comfortable leaving it with him. After having it for over a week and running multiple tests and then running special software specifically designed for retrieving data over RAID configurations, they confirmed my beliefs that once Darrell switched the RAID setting off that he broke the RAID connection which reformatted the drive. At this point, nothing could be saved. A few file names were legible, but data was gone. In reply to Darrell's response: I was honest and forthcoming from the beginning as to what was wrong with the machine. I had turned it on 4-5 times and it had only booted once and it took 45 minutes to boot up, so I knew something was wrong. Could I have fixed it myself? Probably with enough time. I'm a computer professional who put computers together in college. I can mow my own lawn also, but I often pay someone to do it to save me time. That's what I was trying to do here. Even if I hadn't told him that it was a RAID, he had to know that it was in order to turn the RAID off. I think this is a very cut and dry example of him making an honest mistake. It happens. I'm sorry that it happened with my computer, but sometimes a person just needs to admit that made a mistake.