Computers Blog

by Roger Chessell

20 July 2022

My main computer finally broke down 3 weeks ago after giving me lots of intermittent problems in the preceding couple of weeks so it had to go in for repair.

I took the decision to have the speaker on my 17″ laptop repaired at the same time and put my very old 21″ iMac in for a clean and service.

The laptop and the old iMac were repaired and serviced very quickly but the 27″ iMac was proving difficult for the technicians to trace the fault. They checked the hard drive and replaced it with a SSD drive as it was giving indications of being about to fail – the computer is 7 years old after all.

I collected the Laptop and old iMac last week and decided to wait until everything was back before I set about them because the plan was to redo all passwords and make a network of all computers that I could reach from my travels through my own secure internet server – more on that to story to come.

This did not fix the problem of the intermittent crashing so they continued to trace for the fault. They checked the graphics card – that was ok, they watched the temperature sensor I had installed and changed settings looking for the fault and slowly narrowed the fault down.

Finally the fault was discovered to be the PSU (Power Supply Unit) so it was replaced and the computer soak tested for 48 hours.

I arranged with the repair agent to start collecting my remaining iMac and start the process to redoing all the password across my computer world.

All computers are on my desk and running again after having to replace various passwords so now I am going to dedicate each one to a specific function so that I don’t lose everything at the same time if it happens again. 

Before you ask, no I didnt lose any of my work because everything triple backed up – I have lost too much stuff over the years not to be sensible.

So what did this cost me, well there is the 3 weeks without the equipment and a final bill of £500. Now when you consider the cost of replacement for all this equipment it would have been well over £5000 so 10% repair cost against replacement I consider to be worth it.

On a final note, as i said previously I had taken a backup just incase but I needn’t have worried because the technicians transferred everything over to the new SSD that they installed in the 27″ iMac.