DCist reader Torrey writes:

I was hoping you knew of a good local computer repair shop. It’s for my personal laptop. I have been looking all morning and I cant find anything but GeekSquad in NW.

Computer repair is an awful business to be in, and an even worse one to have to patronize. NBC4’s Liz Crenshaw did a piece on it a week or two ago and reached a depressing conclusion: faced with a dead-simple tech problem, only about half the businesses got the diagnosis right.

Computers are simply too cheap to replace and debugging is too time-consuming to provide a repair industry that’s very good. Besides, anyone with any significant degree of technical talent is likely to trade in their Best Buy polo shirt for a real IT job as quickly as they can. That leaves underqualified retail drones as your likely compu-saviors: they’ll slowly work their way through a flowchart in a binder, then charge you $99 (plus marked-up parts) for installing RAM that you may not even need — an operation that’s only slightly harder than placing a game cartridge in an NES.

If you’re very lucky, you’ll end up with a precocious high school kid who hasn’t yet gotten sick of installing AdAware. But why roll the dice on retail when precocious kids can be had for free? The great underground economy of nephews, nieces and neighbor kids can serve you well. It’s why I always have at least one relative patiently waiting for me to come by and reinstall Windows for them. It sounds overly simple, but the truth is that there’s very little that Geek Squad can do for you that a smart teenager can’t — it’s not as if there are SMD soldering stations and disk-disassembly cleanrooms available behind the counter at Circuit City. If you’ve got a software issue or a hardware problem with a desktop system, a nerdy kid armed with a web browser can probably tell you what needs to be done, then do it. They might be wrong, but the same can be said for the pros — and a kid is likely to be more shy about wasting your money.

Photo by ElveretBarnes.