Never trust the workshop
There is a certain trouble with electronic goods – no matter how well you treat your laptop or phone, eventually they things break and you have to go back to the manufacturer and get them fixed.
Now anyone who has ever taken a car back to the dealer to get an alternator or fuel pump replaced will know that the soundtrack that plays in the background is not your local radio station, but rather the opening of Pink Floyd’s ‘Money.’
I would guess that a similar song is playing inside the workshops at any manufacturer of electronic goods.
Now over the past year I have had three experiences (actually two, and a friend had one) where I realised that you have to be doubly careful before letting your broken goods out of your sight.
The first experience (and the third) involved an iPhone. Suddenly a small part of the touchscreen stopped working and I took it into a Vodashop to get it sorted out. The quote for getting it fixed (which actually involves swapping it out for a reconditioned unit) was over R3 000, half of what a new phone would cost.
If I had gone to a third party repair place it would have probably cost 20 percent of that.
Lucky for me my insurance coughed up the cash and I was re-united with my iPhone a couple of weeks later.
Just out of interest my friend had an almost identical experience with her iPhone and her insurance company also paid over R3 000 for a repair that should have cost R300.
Then two weeks ago tragedy struck. Bright and early on a Monday morning my MacBook Pro decided to stop working. I tried everything, as did my IT guy at work, but it was no good. So I jumped in my car and dashed off to the nearest iStore and told them to find out what was wrong.
Luckily for me it was one of those things that was categorised as a recognised issue and so the logic board was replaced free of charge, and in super quick time. But then I get a phone call from the workshop telling me that my hard drive is buggered and it needs to be replaced.
Now I will take some responsibility here as I wrote: “Do not erase data under any circumstances” across the top of the page, so they quoted me for a new hard drive. Talk about sticker shock. Essentially the quote was for more than three times the price of the part that was being replaced.
So I told them to send it back to me and hoped that I could rescue my data from the drive.
To cut a long story short, after the better part of a weekend I finally got every bit of my data back exactly where it was, including all my system settings, and all it took was my time.
Now to be honest if I had to calculate the value of my time I should really have paid someone else to do all this grunt work, but there is a real satisfaction in fixing something yourself and not paying a workshop to do it for you.
That used to be the case with cars, but nowadays with all the fangled electronics in them you can’t really do it yourself. Apparently that’s why the new toy for the mid-life crisis is the expensive bike, because you can still tinker with that…
Just to be clear, replacing the hard drive on a MacBook Pro is not a simple task. It involves removing more than 20 screws and being careful not to disconnect any vital cables. But if you know what you are doing then it is deeply satisfying. Check out www.ifixit.com for a great easy to follow guide.
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