Dave's Computers — Local services in Somerville

Dave did a great job. My heat sink wasn't working and he found a solid water-coolant based after-market that fixed the problem and took care of it after two days. He also fixed a fan that wasn't working and gave my computer a check up and did a little bit of internal cleaning.

He also installed a couple anti-virus programs that I didn't want which slowed down my computer that took me some time to find and uninstall.

He also told me my computer was full of black mold(which he said he cleaned out), suggested that I could have hurt his business, and implied that I wasted his time/didn't take care of my computer.

He was also very aloof, unfriendly, and awkward. I came in having some knowledge but wanting to learn, willing to pay a higher price, and happy to know what I could do to take care of my computer in the future.

He told me to check online.

My computer is 6 years old. I'm a layman. I know a couple of things but not a lot. I generally take good care of my computer but don't really pay as much attention as I could. That being said I don't think it's fair to be made to feel like a jerk for being ignorant especially when I'm paying Dave 279 dollars.

Also they forgot to give me back my computer cord so I had to drive all the way back after I returned home.

I took it to a local computer engineer friend of mine and he said the "black mold" was just very thick dust which he cleaned without much trouble. (There was a lot and it was everywhere to be fair, but I was living in a pretty gross apartment at the time(That aside Dave said he took care of it which he did not.))

All in all the computer still works great. But I'm very annoyed that I got an email and a phone call asking for good reviews after being treated like an imbecile and in my opinion overcharged about 50 bucks.

Dave is very talented, and does great work. He's also rude and pretentious. Maybe that comes with the territory of being young and bright. Who knows. I'm satisfied. But I'll never go back...

After 4 days the conclusion was that it is unclear what the problem with my computer was. I could not figure out if something had been tried that I had not already attempted, or if any diagnostic tools had been used. In addition, I was told that my mac partition had crashed, supposedly already when received, though mac os was running perfectly when i gave them the computer.

I paid the money for the rescue 1 TB hard drive, $80 which is a steep price. The additional $79 diagnostic fee was not returned, though there was no diagnosis. This type of mac is supposed to work with windows 10 according to the official apple website + technical support. They essentially blamed apple for wrongly approving this model for usage with windows 10, even though the models prior and following are also in the official apple list. They didn't give me any proof of that. Apple wasn't even called. Based on internet research i am almost certain that people run windows 10 on this model.

When I picked up my computer, i asked if the windows partition can be ghosted (copied bit by bit), in order to play back a particular state. The agent first didn't understand what i mean and then claimed it is not possible. but in reality is it. He also argued with me that computers with 256 GB RAM don't exist, or that those cost $2500. In reality prices are lower. I told him I found a computer with $128 GB RAM on amazon for $1500. He wouldn't believe me and treated me as if I am stupid. Sad.

Update: Somehow the problem magically fixed itself. I closed the lid and opened it again, and tada! it's working. The problem was that keyboard and trackpad were not working on a macbook pro running Windows 10. I doubt it was a driver update. I have all updates disabled on this machine. I also use EaseUS now to get an exact copy of...

I took my laptop to Dave’s Computers because it wouldn’t turn on, and I needed help figuring out the issue and retrieving my data. They asked for a deposit and told me they’d look at it later. After diagnosing a graphics card failure, they charged me $175 total, which included transferring my data to a USB stick—plus an extra $40 just for the USB drive itself.

The data transfer worked, but the total cost felt excessive for a basic recovery from a working hard drive. There was no clear pricing breakdown up front, and by the time they told me the cost, the computer was already in their hands and i had no way of transfering it myself—so I felt stuck.

Make sure to show around, they seriously overcharge for what they're doing. I personally won’t be returning.

Edit: Thanks for the response. I appreciate the clarification, but I want to be honest about my experience so others know what to expect.

I had reached out online before dropping off my laptop, but I didn’t receive a response—and I didn’t see pricing clearly listed on the website. So by the time I brought the device in, I wasn’t fully informed about potential costs. Once you diagnosed the issue, I felt locked in: if I declined the data transfer, I’d be leaving with nothing.

You may have provided prices via text in stages, but that’s different from having a clear understanding of the total cost upfront. True transparency means customers should know roughly what they’re getting into before they hand over their device.

Just sharing my experience in the hopes it helps others ask the right questions...