ClickAway Tech Repair & IT Services in Santa Cruz — Attraction in Santa Cruz

I had a very very weird experience here. Beware taking in for a free diagnostic. It may not be actually free and they attempted to charge me until I remembered it should be free. Then the employee got mad and escalated verbally.

He stated that I was free to take the device back from the free diagnostic with no charge but I was a bad person if I did so. But also stated he investigated beyond the free diagnostic window because he was curious…

Also beware of any tune up they suggest. In my case it was prescribed because they didn’t have full context on what the actual issue was and they likely just wanted to charge for something.

More details:

There was some communication issue where the actual issue we cared about wasn’t investigated during the diagnostic check. I listened to my girlfriend make the phone call and she initially mentioned overheating, but then mentioned (more importantly) that the device gives an error message about AC power, and mentioned a suspected battery problem. However only overheating was logged as the problem by the shop.

The repair tech, likely from simply looking at the notes, saw overheating, and investigated this issue as the primary one. He went pretty far down this path, and did a stress test with some GPU benchmarks. This did lead to the device throttling as he said to me, but I would think that any laptop under the same benchmark would also exhibit throttling (different from overheating).

The prescription of this throttling “problem” is a firmware update to engage the fans earlier. But since there’s a communication issue around with the actual problem we want solved is, I did not want to go this route.

I brought this into the shop because I did not want to deal with this problem, and I thought that I would feel I was working with honest people. I really did not like how I brought it in for a free diagnostic, the tech attempted to charge me, and when I brought it up that it was a free diagnostic he got verbally angry, and stated that I would be a bad person for taking it back for free, even though I was allowed to do so.

What made this even more weird in my opinion was that he himself stated he “spent time beyond what he would normally allocate for a free diagnostic because he was curious”.

I feel the way that this should be run, is that before making any additional work beyond the free diagnostic, a call should be placed to the customer, rather than trying to extort them over the phone once the device is already in hand.

On the technical side, if a customer has an issue, they report with a stated error message, that should take priority in any sort of issue description logging, as it will be directly relevant to fixing the issue.

Given that this shop did not uncover anything insightful, I investigated it myself, by researching the error message online, and it seems to be a port/battery/power specific issue which I’ve already mitigated (within an hour). This has nothing to do with the $200 tuneup they were attempting to charge me.

I do not have full context on the tuneup, but my intuition is certainly that that is a moneymaking procedure that they were prescribing because there was no clear issue, and a tuneup does do something adjacent to fixing the assumed issue (overheating). So there is an ostensible reason they would charge for it.

Separately this device also needs a new battery as it drains in 90 minutes from full. They did not uncover this in their diagnostic.

The diagnostic was initiated under Mineun Kang, if you want to reach out and discuss...

ClickAway staff and Customer Service are fantastic.

The staff is dedicated and works together as a team to take care of walk-ins with small and big problems with their phone laptop desktop notebooks.

There a location is in the heart of Santa Cruz. There’s plenty of parking. There is bicycle rack. The adjoining businesses are complimentary.

Highway 17, HWY 1, Santa Cruz pier, and the boardwalk and W. Cliff Drive the Lighthouse are about within a couple miles.

I am a relatively new customer, but have firsthand experience within the past three months:

My iPhone slipped out of my pocket while bicycling, smashed screen. They repaired quickly.

My beloved MacBook Pro. with all upgrades is now 15 years old, Traveled with me north south east west throughout the United States. was not able to accommodate incompatible with new printer and Apps.

I did not want to buy another laptop, I wanted a desktop. And I wanted to Mac because I love iMovie for editing films. I am 72 years old and living on Social Security. within a few days ClickAway and I put together a fantastic desktop. It was all Macintosh and with a three year Macintosh extended warranty. Or about $2000, which is about 50 percent less than if I had purchased directly from McIntosh.

ClickAway thoroughly examined my old MacBook Pro and cleaned up the tangled mess of duplications and hundreds of files. They assembled all the new Apple desktop and transferred everything on my MacBook Pro to it, in one day. I loaded everything into my car and brought it home, and set it up.

I am a very happy man; I’m very grateful with all that ClickAway staff did to make my dream come true. I have a very nice, super fast...

Click-Away and all of their techs/employees that I have ever worked with are great! My whole family brings in their computers here. My dad even calls sometimes just to ask questions so he can do something without bringing the computer in, and they are very cool about it since he's a good customer. I have had a great experience with Lawrence in the past. This visit, I was greeted by Vince, who very patiently waited for me while I got on the phone with my dad who was helping me find my Apple password (took forever, thanks for being cool about it, Vince!) Then from there, I worked with Chris, and Chris was so knowledgeable, had fantastic communication and follow up, and was really nice. He was very honest about my computer and his opinion about what needed to happen (saving me from getting a new computer). He took the time to explain to me and show me things in detail, including how a backup drive works and, put simply, how you can lose information after 4 plug-ins. I am not a computer/tech savvy person, but Chris did a great job explaining it to me. He even stayed almost a half hour later without charging labor to add 4 GB/Ram for my computer after I changed my mind after hearing the benefits. To be honest, it was an expensive visit (I don't feel like the fixes I needed would be cheaper anywhere else anyway), but it included a very generous discount because they are super cool and want to help out their customers as much as possible. All in all, it only took from like 8:30-3:30 to get my computer back! He really put it as a priority I feel like, and I really appreciated that. I definitely recommend Click-Away and CHRIS!...