Computer and laptop repair, Mac and Windows. Repaired for less than replaced.

What we work on

• Cracked and dead laptop screens, including hinges that tore the display cable on the way down
• Batteries that will not hold a charge, and swollen batteries pushing a trackpad or a case apart
• Machines that have slowed to the point of being unusable, which is usually storage, heat, or clutter rather than age
• Liquid spills: coffee, water, wine, and the one nobody admits to
• Failing hard drives, SSD upgrades, and data recovery attempts off drives that are on their way out
• Fans screaming, laptops running hot, and thermal paste that has turned to chalk
• Charge ports and power jacks, the ones that only work if you hold the cable just so
• No-boot machines, no-power machines, and the ones that turn on but never reach the desktop
• Operating system reinstalls, migrations to a new computer, and setups that went sideways

MacBooks get their own page with the detail specific to them, so if you are on the Apple side start with MacBook repair. Desktop and custom rigs have theirs at gaming PCs.

My computer got slow. Can you fix that?

Most of the time, a computer that has become painful to use is not worn out. It is a machine with a mechanical hard drive in it in a world that has moved on to solid state, and it spends its life waiting on that drive. Putting an SSD in a laptop that has never had one is the single largest improvement per dollar in this entire business. It is not subtle. People come back and describe it as a new computer.

Memory is the second lever. A machine running four gigabytes in a world where a browser with a dozen tabs wants more than that is going to swap constantly, and swapping on top of a slow drive is the whole problem compounding. Adding memory, where the machine allows it, is cheap and immediate.

The third cause is heat. A laptop that has spent five years on a couch has a heatsink packed with dust, and when it cannot dump heat, it throttles itself down on purpose. That machine is not slow, it is protecting itself. A proper cleaning and a fresh thermal repaste gives you back performance that was never actually gone.

Only after those three do we get to software: too many things launching at boot, a browser carrying 30 extensions, or an actual malware problem. We will tell you which it is. What we will not do is sell you a new machine when yours needs a hundred dollars of parts.

Spills, heat, and the physical failures

If you spill on a laptop, the two things that matter happen in the first minute: shut it down, holding the power button if you have to, and unplug it. Then turn it upside down like a tent so gravity pulls liquid away from the board instead of into it. Do not turn it back on to check whether it survived. That check is what kills machines, because liquid plus power is what corrodes and shorts, not liquid alone.

Sugary drinks are worse than water because the sugar stays behind and keeps bridging contacts after everything feels dry. So bring it in rather than waiting a week to see what happens. We open it, clean the board properly, and assess what survived. Some spills are a clean and a keyboard. Some take out a board. We will show you what we found either way.

Hinges are the other physical failure worth knowing about. On a lot of laptops the hinge is anchored into plastic, that plastic cracks, and then every open and close puts strain on the display cable running through it. If your lid has started to feel loose or the screen flickers when you move it, deal with it before the cable tears, because the repair is smaller now than it will be later.

Data first, always

When a machine is failing, the repair is the second priority. The data is the first. We would rather spend the first hour getting your files off a drive that is clicking than spend it on anything else, because a drive that is still readable today may not be tomorrow.

If your computer will not boot, do not keep power-cycling it in the hope it catches. Every retry on a dying mechanical drive is another pass over damaged sectors. Bring it in, let us image the drive first, and then we can talk about whether the machine gets a new drive or whether the files move to a different computer entirely.

We are honest about the limits here. Recovery from a drive with mechanical failure is not guaranteed by anybody, and a shop that promises otherwise is guessing. What we can promise is that we will try the safe approaches first and tell you before we do anything that reduces your odds.

Business, school, and clinic machines along Route 1

A broken laptop at a business is not a computer problem, it is a scheduling problem, and the cost is the person sitting idle. We service schools, hospitals, and businesses, and the practical things that matter for them are different: predictable turnaround, keeping a user profile intact rather than starting fresh, and telling you honestly when a machine should be retired instead of repaired for the third time.

Offices in Wakefield, Peabody, and Stoneham are close enough to drop something off on the way in and pick it up on the way home, and Route 1 is the road most of that traffic is already on. If you have a stack of machines rather than one, come talk to us in person and we will scope it.

When we tell you to stop spending

There is a point on every laptop where the repair costs more than the machine is worth, and we would rather say it than take the work. That point usually arrives when a machine needs a board-level repair, when the model has no available parts left, or when the thing has already had two significant repairs and is now asking for a third.

When we get there, we say so and we lay out the options: put the money into a different machine, move your data over, and if you want, sell us the old one so it goes toward the next one. We buy laptops, and a dead laptop is often worth more than people assume. The MacBook buyback page covers the Apple side of that, and the general sell your device page covers the rest.