The cheapest computer is usually the one already sitting on your desk.
Machines get replaced for reasons that have very little to do with the machine. A drive that has slowed to a crawl, four years of software nobody ever uninstalled, a fan choked with dust. A proper service and one well-chosen upgrade will often buy another two or three years for a fraction of what a replacement costs. When it won’t, we’ll tell you that instead.
What a service actually involves
Not a virus scan and a shrug. A maintenance service on our bench covers:
- A physical clean — dust out of the fans, heatsinks and vents, and fresh thermal paste where the old paste has dried out. This alone fixes a surprising number of machines that run hot, throttle or sound like a hairdryer.
- Drive health — SMART data, error counts and free space. Drives usually give warning before they fail. Almost nobody sees it, because nothing tells them to look.
- Startup and background load — the programs that quietly launch with Windows every morning and are never used.
- Updates and drivers — Windows, firmware and drivers brought current, with the ones known to cause trouble left alone.
- Security — antivirus actually running and actually up to date, plus a look through for anything that shouldn’t be there.
- Backups — whether one exists, whether it is still running, and whether it would restore if you needed it. A lot of them wouldn’t.
You get told what we found and what we changed, in plain language.
Upgrades that genuinely change how a machine feels
- An SSD — replacing a mechanical hard drive with a solid state drive is still the single biggest improvement available to an older computer. Startup and program loading go from minutes to seconds, and the machine stops feeling old.
- More memory — for a lot of browser tabs, photo editing, accounting software or virtual machines. Cheap, quick, and the right fix for a computer that is fine right up until it isn’t.
- More storage — a larger drive or a second one, so you aren’t managing free space every other week.
- A new battery — a laptop that only works plugged into the wall is a desktop with a bad keyboard. Usually a simple fix.
- Better cooling — for machines that shut down, throttle or get loud under load.
- Graphics — for gaming, CAD, video work or driving several monitors.
- Windows 11 — where the hardware supports it. Where it doesn’t, we’ll explain what your realistic options are now that Windows 10 is out of support.
When we'll tell you not to bother
An upgrade is not always the right call, and we would rather say so before you spend the money. We’ll usually recommend against it when:
- The parts needed cost more than the machine is worth to replace
- The bottleneck is the processor, which generally can’t be changed without changing the motherboard and memory too
- The hardware can’t run Windows 11 and no upgrade will get it there
- The work has outgrown the class of machine, not just its specifications
We’d rather lose an upgrade job and keep the customer.
Frequently asked
How long does a service take?
Usually a day or two, depending on what we find and how full the bench is. If we need to keep it longer than expected, we’ll ring you and tell you why.
How often should a computer be serviced?
About once a year for a home machine in a normal room. More often if it sits on carpet, lives in a kitchen or workshop, or if there are pets in the house.
Will I lose anything?
No. We back up before we do anything invasive, and nothing gets wiped without you agreeing to it first.
Can you upgrade a laptop?
Often, yes — storage and memory are replaceable in many models. Slim laptops increasingly have both soldered to the board. Tell us the model and we’ll check before you commit to anything.
Do you service business computers on a schedule?
Yes. We can work through a set of machines on an agreed cycle, and outside business hours where that suits you better.