Alfa Computer | IT Service | Repairs | Data Recovery — Local services in Woburn

Let me start by saying what I mean by "five stars". In my brain, "no stars" means "utterly useless". "One star" means "did at least ONE thing not COMPLETELY as bad is it could be." "Two stars" means "below average, but, if I had to, they would work out at least a little", "three" is "average", four is "better than average."

I don't usually give five stars to anybody. Five stars is the best there is.

I've gone to Alfa twice now. Lemme tell you about them. The first time, my wife's hard drive failed. I brought in her laptop. They couldn't fix it, but they did get all the data off and onto a new hard drive -- that day. In about four hours.

They tried to charge me for only about half the time they put into it (plus the cost of the disk they put it on), because they felt like they'd failed me by ONLY saving all of the data. I did insist, and pay them for the whole thing, because, well, they DID do all the work, and they DID succeed in the important part of the whole thing. The fact that, when they opened it up, it turned out that things had shorted out and turned part of the laptop into slag isn't their fault, and there is nobody on the planet who can make a computer that bits melted on work again.

All they did was literally everything that any human could have done, in four hours, for the least amount of money that anybody possibly could charge.

Then, today... so, my computer's boot sector went all wonky (that's the technical term, I think), and I looked up how to fix it, and it was a really easy thing -- get a spare boot disk, load it up, press the button that says "fix the wonky thing". The problem was that I didn't have a spare boot disk. But I pass, like, four computer repair places between dropping my wife off at work and going home, so I figured ONE of them would be willing to sell me one.

None of them could. And I'm not dinging any of them, or giving them bad reviews or anything like that -- it turns out that the boot disk and the install disk are the same thing, and so they could only sell me one by selling me an entire operating system. I kept asking them if there was any such thing as just a boot disk without an install on it; nobody had heard of such a thing.

Finally, I got to Alfa, who are the one closest to my house, so the last one I hit.

They didn't think that any such thing existed either.

So they handed me an install disk and told me to bring it back later, or, if that didn't work, bring back the whole computer. They figured that they couldn't sell me just the disk, but since I already had a copy, they could LEND me the disk.

I did, I went home, booted it up, pressed the "make this work" button, and it worked. I then returned their disk, and asked them what I owed them for the rental which completely saved me.

They wouldn't take money for that, either. I mean, I'd anticipated they might do that, so I had brought a Dunks gift card so I could at least buy them coffee, because I didn't want to be ungrateful that they saved my bacon, but that's who these folks are. They are very competent, very affordably priced, and take deep pride in their work.

I'm not saying that, if you go there, they'll give you free stuff like they did for me. I'm saying that, if you go there, they'll solve your problem for an extremely...

I brought my macbook here in 2020 for data recovery. They never would call me to provide updates (first red flag), yet I would periodically call for an update and they would just tell me the recovery keeps crashing but they’ll keep working on it. This went on for almost 4 years believe it or not, as I was desperate to get my data and had faith they were working on it. They finally told me they couldn’t recover it and as a last resort they sent it out. That didn’t work so I finally picked it up this past summer.

I sent my macbook to another data recovery place and they were able to recover the files, however the data was not mine. I called Alfa multiple times to figure out what happened and their response was simply “we tag all of our computers so it’s highly unlikely we gave you the wrong macbook or hard drive”. They finally gave me the contact of where they “sent my laptop to” (HI Recovery LLC) and the place is no longer in business.

Angry doesn’t describe how I feel. I believe the hard drive/laptop I was given belongs to someone named Stephen JeanBaptiste. Supposedly Alfa doesn’t have that person on their system so maybe the mixup happened at the “HI Recovery”. In a perfect world this person has my hard drive and I can finally get my data back.

Long story short don’t go here. SalvageData Recovery was the other place I worked with and would recommend anyone with important recovery needs go...

The Best Ever highly qualified. Iam 75 and far from computer literate. Tan and his staff had the patience of Job with me. Everything was fully explained to me in detail. Ionly knew how to turn on the computer and point and click!!! never even knew how to aswer my cell phone or how to text. They have made my life so much better and always with a smile and a kind word. I think they do not charge enough for these services!!! I would very highly recommend this company for all you techies out there and also to old people like myself who have a tough time with all these new fangled devices. They arrive on time and take their time to make sure you understand things, Recently they set up my new computer and if I had any additional questions the answers came back immediately. Try getting service like that from anyone today. Real live people answer the phone always friendly, always helpful and always inquire about my health. A pleasure to have in my home and they never made me feel stupid. Hire them. You will never...