ICW

Internet Explorer stopped working on my wife's desktop. The computer is several years old, and she uses it primarily for shopping on-line, e-mails, and recipe storage; i.e., minimal use. I took it in to ICW for repair. They diagnosed it as a Winsock 2 failure. They also disabled the McAfee firewall, which they claim causes lots of problems and is a terrible program. They charged $63, which I thought was a reasonable amount, and I left happy. Unfortunately, the second time my wife turned her computer on, it failed to boot up. I took it back to ICW, which diagnosed it as a hard drive failure. They recovered as much of her data files as they could, installed a new hard drive, operating system, Internet Explorer, and Office Outlook & Office (which had been on her old computer). They charged an additional $222, insisting the new problem was completely unrelated to the repair of the first problem, though I'm not much of a believer in coincidences like this. After I reloaded the other programs she uses (I had no backup of her recipes), she continued to have problems with the computer; relatively minor ones, but frequent and thus very frustrating for her. Having already invested $285 for repairs within a one month period (and we were out of town for 3 of those weeks), I decided to cut my losses and bought a brand new desk top for $400. I gave ICW a "C" rating, but I'm ambivalent about that. There appear to be two employees there with quite different personalities and possibly competence. I dealt with Mark the first time around, but he was out on my return and I was stuck with the other. That, plus two repairs back to back, plus their negative remarks about McAfee (and Norton) security software, both of which receive good reviews in computer magazines, left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I'm definitely looking for a better shop.