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Desktop Hardware Repair Portland

You might need a nerd if…

Common Terms

Hard Disk Drive

The hard drive stores all of your data. It is a box that contains multiple spinning platters. These platters contain data stored magnetically by the hard drive head

RAM

RAM means Random Access Memory, and is what your computer uses to store things that it is thinking about while it is on. When your computer turns off, everything in RAM goes away.

Graphics Card

The graphics card is a specialized computer that runs inside your computer and processes all the things on the screen. The more detailed the screen activity, the harder the graphics card has to work

Network Card

The network card handles your computer's connection to the internet. It translates the instructions sent by your computer into packets, that can be sent to another computer online.

Is your desktop's hardware giving you grief? Whether you have a soundless soundcard, a soft hard drive, or sheepish RAM, Nerds On Call Computer Repair Portland can help you fix your computer's parts! Our Nerds got their start repair desktop hardware, and it remains one of our most popular services. In all honesty, desktop hardware repair is not the most difficult service we have to perform in Portland. Things like rootkit removal are usually much worse. However, it takes a lot of knowledge to have the intuition necessary for desktop hardware repair. Complicated specs like DDR and SATA are just some of the things our techs have to learn to keep desktop computers in line. If you have a problem with your desktop's hardware, give us a call! We offer free estimates and we'd love to look at your computer to see how we can fix it. Once we've pinpointed the problem, we'll give you an estimate of how much it would take to repair. You don't have to accept it, but we guarantee it'll be reasonable. If you accept, we can get to work - and we're not done until you're satisfied. If any part of our hardware repair job is not up to your standards, we aren't done! Let us know just how you like it and we'll do it that way. For the best desktop hardware repair in the Northwest, call Nerds On Call Computer Repair Portland!

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Nerds Price List

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Questions nerds often hear about Desktop Hardware Repair Portland

USB Hub Repair Portland

A while back people decided that they needed to be able to attach more devices to their computer. All the flash drives, mice, printers, keyboards, and USB-powered desk foam missile launchers were just taking up more room than the computers were built with. So they invented the USB card. At the time this was a great and logical idea. It would provide a way to plug more devices in. You may have a USB card in your computer right now; however, technology evolves very quickly.

USB Hub Repair Portland

SD Card Reader Repair Portland

Portland is a very photogenic city. Many people love taking pictures of it, documenting the people here, or travelling the surrounding areas to take pictures of the majestic scenery. Now whether you’re a professional photographer or you just have an album on Facebook entitled “photography,” you probably want to be able to transfer your photos from your camera to your computer.

SD Card Reader Repair Portland

Sound Card Repair Portland

A long, long time ago, in a land not so far away, there was a woman. She lived in the sun-kissed hills around Portland with her horses, who liked to frolic in the fields and play Frisbee. Her great passion was music. She would often call upon the goddess Pandora, who would bless her wood elf named Sound Card with the gift of song. Sound Card would sing merrily in his crisp and clear tone and the woman would listen to it all day long. One day however, the woman woke up and found that Sound Card was deathly ill.

Sound Card Repair Portland

CD / DVD / Blu-Ray Repair Portland

Here in Portland we like our films. While so much is available on the internet these days, there is plenty that you can’t quite find online. For these you need your old CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive. Optical drives used to be all the rage, before the days of flash drive storage and internet speeds that could support high-speed transfer. Nowadays optical drives are beginning to be outdated, but they still serve their purposes.

CD / DVD / Blu-Ray Repair Portland

Fan Replacement Portland

The fans in your computer keep your computer cool. I’m sure that probably seems self-explanatory, but they’re an often-overlooked component of your computer. While Portland doesn’t get particularly hot, it’s sufficiently warm enough to necessitate cooling on your PC. The average computer has two fans: one on the processor, and one on the case that circulates the air to keep all the different parts cool. When these aren’t functioning at full capacity, your computer can heat up. And when your computer heats up, there can be problems. Components can be damaged irreparably, and the computer as a whole will run more slowly and less efficiently.

Fan Replacement Portland

Processor Repair Portland

The processor in your computer functions as the brain. So if the processor goes, the whole computer does. A good way to tell if your processor is starting to go is if the computer regularly just stops functioning – the mouse locks up and the screen stays on, but nothing responds. This can happen in a few ways. One way is simply if the computer gets old. Computers die after a while. Another way is if inadequate cooling allows the processor to overheat. You’ll know if this happens – there will be big black marks on your motherboard. Oh, and your computer won’t turn on. That will probably clue you in pretty quickly.

Processor Repair Portland

Network Card Repair Portland

Can you browse the internet…with your mind? No. No you can’t. That would be nice though. In the meantime though, all of us normal humans here in Portland will have to use some sort of network card to connect to the internet. Network cards come in a variety of different types. Some are the 3G modems in our phones, and then in our desktops we have wired and wireless PCI cards, not to mention all the different standards. There’s a lot of variation on one simple theme – getting you to connect to the internet. It’s a lot to keep track of, especially for something you won’t really be concerned with from day to day.

Network Card Repair Portland

Graphics Card Repair

Graphics cards control everything we see. Wait, no, I’m thinking of the media. Let me look this up and I’ll get back to you. Yeah, I was right the first time too. Graphics cards are basically computers within computers. Except they only deal with what goes on your screen. Your CPU handles all the back-end stuff – calculating math, connecting to the internet, and a bunch of stuff you probably didn’t even know your computer did. Your graphics card makes sure it all looks good. If you’ve ever used a design program or played a game with more complexity than solitaire, you probably already appreciate the hard work that your graphics card puts in for you. Even if you aren’t explicitly using graphics applications, you use your graphics card more than you think.

Graphics Card Repair

Motherboard Repair

PDX is a busy place – planes shuttling in and out of Portland, thousands of people pouring through every day, and all of the air traffic managed by a single control tower. Now imagine if that tower had technical issues, even briefly. The damage could be immense – even leading to catastrophic crashes. Your motherboard in your computer is a lot like this control tower. It coordinates all the different aspects of running your computer. All the other parts, like your hard drive, processor, and CD drive are all plugged into your motherboard and rely on it for function. So when your motherboard encounters an error, the entire computer suffers.

Motherboard Repair

Power Supply Repair

Here in Portland we kind of like our clean power. We want to make sure we have an efficient power supply – something that comes from renewable resources, like caged hamsters or wind. No nukes, am I right? So with all this concern for the power supply for our city, why aren’t we concerned more about the power supply that our computers use? Given, it’s not on such a large scale, but poor power supplies can reduce the efficiency of our computers and/or drain energy from our power bill and waste electricity. In fact, many power supplies that off-the-shelf computer ship with are incredibly poor. The computer companies can cut corners because most people probably won’t notice the difference right away, but as soon as that year-long-warranty expires, they tend to just go haywire. Add onto this the fact that it is likely either drawing too much power and wasting it, or drawing too little and damaging your computer, and you have good reason to get that power supply replaced!

Power Supply Repair

Desktop RAM Upgrade & Repair Portland

Maybe you’re in the hills and valleys around Portland herding your sheep. They’re all just bouncing along fluffily when out of the blue one of your rams keels over. He has broken a leg. You need ram repair right now! So you get on your smartphone, Google “ram repair” and come across this page. Well, I hate to break it to you, but…we can’t help you.

Desktop RAM Upgrade & Repair Portland

Desktop Hard Drive Repair

So, you decided to keep reading to find out what exactly what it was that we do? Good for you. One of the many devices that we can repair is the hard drive. The hard drive is a set of metal disks spinning around very quickly (seventy-two thousand times a minute) inside a metal case. Super-powerful neodymium magnets read and write the data on the hard drive but because all the information stored on your hard drive is magnetic, one of the things that you should definitely keep them away from is magnets. Magnets will seriously mess up your hard drive – although the shielding is better now than it used to be. The protection has improved and because it’s pretty uncommon for a hard drive to come in contact with another powerful magnet, this disastrous problem isn’t much of a concern for most people.

Desktop Hard Drive Repair