Broken, slow or not charging?
It's rarely terminal.
Comprehensive laptop repairs and upgrades, offering expert services to enhance performance, resolve hardware issues, and keep your devices up-to-date with the latest technology.
Diagnostics from
Quote before work
Kept, not wiped
Makes, incl. MacBook
Bench diagnostic · report
Fault identifiedStart with the symptom.
We'll find the cause.
Laptops fail in their own particular ways: everything is packed tight, soldered down and worked hard. The same complaint can have several causes, which is why we diagnose before quoting.
01
Won't charge, or charges only sometimes
Wiggling the cable to keep it going, a loose or wobbly socket, or nothing at all. Usually the DC jack, sometimes the charger or the charging circuit.
Power port
02
Battery lasts minutes
Unplugged and it dies, or it shows 100% then drops to nothing. Cycle count and real capacity tell us whether it’s the battery or the charging circuit.
Battery
03
Dead or sticky keys
Individual keys not registering, repeating, or a spill that took out half the keyboard. Often a keyboard replacement, occasionally just a ribbon.
Keyboard
04
Lid won't stay up, or the case is cracking
Hinges stiffening then tearing out of the plastic, corners splitting, and a bezel lifting away from the screen. Fix it early and it stays cheap.
Hinges & casing
05
Painfully slow
Minutes to boot, spinning cursor, everything freezing. Nine times in ten it’s a mechanical hard drive that should have been an SSD years ago.
SSD upgrade
06
Hot, loud, and shutting down
Fan screaming, palm rest too hot to touch, random shutdowns under load. Blocked vents and dried thermal paste, and it’s cooking the battery underneath.
Clean & re-paste
07
No display, or nothing at all
Power light on and a black screen, or completely dead. Could be memory, screen, cable or board, testable in minutes on the bench.
Diagnosis first
08
Wi-Fi dropping or missing
Slow, disconnecting or no wireless at all. Usually the card, its antenna leads, or a driver, rarely your broadband, whatever the ISP said.
Wi-Fi
09
Won't boot into Windows or macOS
Repair loops, missing operating system, corrupt profiles. Often recoverable without losing a single file.
OS repair
10
Liquid spill or a drop
Coffee, wine, a fall off the sofa. Time matters enormously, the sooner it’s opened, cleaned and dried, the more survives. Don’t try charging it.
Urgent, call us
None of these quite it? Ring us and describe it, we've almost certainly had it on the bench before.
We replace what's faulty,
not the whole thing.
Manufacturers would rather swap a whole board, or sell you a new machine. We work on the parts inside, which is usually the difference between a bill in the tens and a bill in the hundreds.
Power port / DC jack repair
The most common laptop fault there is. Cracked solder joints and worn sockets re-soldered or replaced at board level, rather than condemning the machine.
Battery replacement
Health measured against design capacity rather than guessed. Correct cells fitted, including glued-in and internal batteries, and swollen ones removed safely.
Hard drive & SSD
The single most effective upgrade there is. Failing drives replaced, mechanical disks swapped for SSDs or NVMe, everything cloned across exactly as it was.
Keyboard & touchpad
Dead, sticky or repeating keys, spill damage and trackpads that won’t click or track. Individual keys, full keyboards and palm rest assemblies.
Hinge repair
Stiff or seized hinges tear the mounting points out of the lid and crack the case around them. Repaired, re-anchored or replaced before it takes the screen with it.
Casing & chassis repair
Cracked corners, broken lid backs, split palm rests, snapped feet and worn plastics, repaired or replaced so the laptop closes and sits properly again.
Motherboard repair
No-power, no-POST, charging and hardware faults diagnosed properly, with faulty parts repaired or replaced where practical.
Memory (RAM)
Faulty modules found by full memory testing, and capacity increases that stop the machine crawling with a few tabs and a spreadsheet open.
Wi-Fi & connectivity
Dropping connections, missing wireless and weak signal, cards replaced, antenna leads re-seated, Bluetooth and drivers sorted, plus Wi-Fi 6 upgrades.
Optical & DVD drives
Discs not reading, trays that won’t open, or drives that vanished from the system, replaced, or the bay converted to a second drive if you’d rather.
Cooling, fans & overheating
Fan removed and cleaned, the felted dust mat cleared from the exhaust fins, fresh thermal paste, and worn fan bearings replaced while it’s open.
Software, OS & virus removal
Windows or macOS that won’t boot, corrupt profiles, driver conflicts, malware and years of accumulated junk. Repaired without wiping wherever we can.
Please note: We don't offer motherboard component-level repairs such as micro-soldering, SMD/IC replacement, PCB trace repair or BIOS chip replacement.
Screens have their own page: cracked, dim, black or lined displays are covered under laptop screen repair.
We find the fault first.
Then we tell you the price.
A diagnostic is proper bench time: power, memory, storage, thermals and boot, tested in order until the actual cause is found. Not a guess, and not a free “look” that quietly becomes a bill.
Standard diagnostic
Most faults, most laptops
The usual suspects, worked through methodically on the bench and reported back with a fixed quote to fix it.
- Charger, DC jack and boot testing
- Memory test, storage SMART and battery health
- Thermal and fan check under load
- Hinges, ports, keyboard and screen check
- Written findings and a fixed repair quote
In-depth diagnostic
Intermittent and awkward faults
For the ones that only misbehave sometimes: the crash that happens twice a week, the charge that works only at one angle, or a motherboard that flashes LEDs.
- Everything in the standard diagnostic
- Extended soak and stress testing
- Known-good part testing to pinpoint the fault
- Board-level and liquid damage inspection under magnification
- Event log and crash dump analysis
The diagnostic fee is credited against the repair when you go ahead, so if we fix it, you don't pay twice.
Most "slow old laptops"
are neither.
A five-year-old laptop with an SSD, enough memory and a fresh battery will outrun a cheap new one, and you keep everything exactly as it is. We’ll tell you honestly when that stops being true.
Buying a new laptop
Several hundred pounds, minimum
And the budget end of new often has slower storage and less memory than the machine you’re replacing.
A day of setup
Software, licences, printers, VPN, Wi-Fi, browser logins and two-factor apps, all over again.
Transfer risk
Every migration is a chance to lose something that only ever lived in one folder on one laptop.
A working machine thrown away
Usually over one worn part, a battery, a charge port or a drive, worth a fraction of the replacement.
Upgrading what you have
SSD: the upgrade people notice
Boot times from minutes to seconds. On an older laptop it’s the single biggest difference available.
A new battery makes it portable again
Cheaper than a new machine by an order of magnitude, and it turns a desk-bound laptop back into a laptop.
Cloned, not reinstalled
Your Windows or macOS, files, software and settings moved across exactly as they are. Nothing to set up again.
And an honest answer
Some laptops have soldered memory and glued-in drives. Where an upgrade isn’t possible or isn’t worth it, we’ll say so.
Booked in to
back on your desk.
Four steps, and a phone call before anything costs you money.
Drop it in, or we'll collect it
Tell us what it's doing and when it started - the symptom is half the diagnosis. Arrange a drop off to our Great Barr or Burntwood workshops, or we can arrange a collection locally.
- Drop in or collection locally
- Book and Appointment
- Business priority available
Bench time, from £20
Charger and DC jack, battery health, memory, storage, thermals and boot, tested in order until the actual cause is found. Intermittent faults go on soak test rather than back to you with a shrug.
- From £20 standard
- £30 in-depth
- Credited against the repair
A fixed price, before we start
You get the fault, the fix, the total cost of parts & labour and the turnaround, plus a straight answer on whether it's worth doing. Nothing is ordered or fitted until you say yes.
- Fixed written quote
- Parts specified
- Honest "not worth it" if so
Fixed, tested, and your data untouched
Repaired on the bench, run under load to prove the fault is gone, and the vents cleaned out while it's open. Your files, software and settings stay exactly as they were unless you've asked otherwise.
- Tested under load
- Data kept
- Warranty on parts & labour
Labour you can predict.
Everything quoted up front.
Every job starts with a diagnostic and a fixed quote, so nothing arrives as a surprise on the invoice.
Diagnostic
Find the fault, then decide
- Full hardware test on the bench
- Battery health and charging check
- Written findings, plain English
- Fixed quote to repair
- Credited against the repair if you proceed
£30 for intermittent or board-level faults
Most common
Repair & upgrade
Parts fitted, tested and warranted
Get a fixed quote
- Diagnostic fee credited against this
- SSD and memory upgrades with full cloning
- Battery, keyboard and hinge replacement
- Fan, heatsink and thermal paste service
- Tested under load before it goes back
- Warranty on parts and workmanship
We aim to repair within 1-3 days, if parts are required we will inform you of repair time
Board-level & liquid damage
The jobs others turn away
Get a fixed quote
- DC jack and charging circuit soldering
- Liquid damage clean and corrosion repair
- No-power and no-POST fault tracing
- Data recovery before anything else is tried
- Honest verdict if the board isn't viable
In-depth diagnostic required first
Business customers: collection and return across Birmingham, Great Barr, the West Midlands and Burntwood, plus priority turnaround on support contracts.
The bits people
actually ring up to ask.
Diagnostics
£30 for intermittent or board-level faults. Credited against the repair when you go ahead.
Quotes
Written and approved before any part is ordered or fitted. If the job changes, we stop and call you.
Your data
Repairs and upgrades keep your files, software and settings. We clone rather than reinstall wherever we can.
Turnaround
For stocked parts and standard repairs. Ordered parts are fitted the day they arrive.
Turnaround, warranty and pricing terms to be confirmed with each job.
Every make,
including the sealed ones.
Consumer, business and gaming laptops, ultrabooks, 2-in-1s, Chromebooks and MacBooks, including models the manufacturer would rather replace than repair.
- Apple MacBook
- Dell
- HP
- Lenovo
- Acer
- ASUS
- Microsoft Surface
- MSI
- Razer
- Toshiba
- Samsung
- Sony VAIO
- Huawei
- Chromebooks
- Gaming laptops
- 2-in-1 & convertibles
Most laptops arrive
with more than one thing wrong.
If it’s already open on the bench, related work costs less than booking it back in later.
Laptop screen repair
Panels, cables, backlights and bezels, replaced in the same workshop, usually within 24-48 hours, with a fixed quote first.
Laptop maintenance
Annual fan and vent cleans, battery health checks, managed antivirus and updates on a care plan, most laptop repairs start as neglected maintenance.
IT support
Companies on a support plan get collection, a loan laptop where we can, and their repairs pushed to the front of the queue.
Common questions
Before you bring it in.
How much is a diagnostic?
Diagnostics start from £20. More intricate or in-depth work: intermittent faults that need soak testing, component swap testing, or board-level and liquid damage inspection, is £30. Either way the fee is credited against the repair if you go ahead, so you’re not paying twice.
My laptop won't charge unless I hold the cable. Is that fixable?
Almost always. It’s usually the DC jack: the socket’s solder joints crack after years of the cable being pulled at an angle. We re-solder or replace the jack at board level rather than condemning the machine. Get it done early: once it stops charging entirely, the battery drains and it can become a bigger job.
Will I get a price before any work happens?
Always. Once the fault is identified you get a fixed written quote covering parts, labour and turnaround. Nothing is ordered or fitted until you approve it, and if the job changes once we’re inside, we stop and call you.
Will I lose my files?
No. Repairs and upgrades keep your data, even an SSD upgrade is normally a clone, so your system, software and settings come back exactly as they were. Where a clean reinstall genuinely is the right answer, we back everything up first and tell you before doing it.
Can you replace a battery that's glued in?
Yes, including MacBooks and most modern ultrabooks. It takes longer and needs the right adhesive removal, which is reflected in the quote. If a battery is swollen, stop using it and bring it in: that’s a safety issue, not a performance one.
My laptop is slow. Do I need a new one?
Usually not. Most “slow” laptops are running a mechanical hard drive or are short of memory, and an SSD plus a RAM upgrade transforms them for a fraction of a replacement. Some newer models have memory soldered to the board, we’ll tell you honestly what’s possible with yours.
How long does a repair take?
Typically 24-72 hours for standard repairs with parts we stock. Board-level work and anything needing an ordered part takes longer, and we’ll give you a realistic timescale with the quote rather than an optimistic one.
I spilled a drink on it. What should I do?
Turn it off immediately, don’t try to charge it, and don’t leave it in rice. Corrosion starts within hours, so the sooner it’s opened, cleaned and dried properly, the more survives. Bring it straight in, this is genuinely a same-day matter.
Do you repair MacBooks?
Yes, batteries, keyboards, trackpads, charging circuits, storage and liquid damage. Apple designs them to be difficult rather than impossible; we’ll tell you upfront where a repair isn’t viable or where the part cost makes it not worth doing.
Need a quote on a Repair or Upgrade
Describe the symptom and the make and model, and we’ll tell you what it’s likely to be, what the diagnostic will cost, and roughly what a repair would come to. Or just bring it in: diagnostics start from £20.
Our Other Laptop Services
Data Recovery
We offer fast, reliable data recovery services to retrieve lost or corrupted files from hard drives, SSDs, and other storage devices.
Virus Removal
Our virus removal services eliminate malware, spyware, and other threats to restore your system’s security and performance.
Laptop Maintenance
Our Laptop Maintenance and Support services are designed to keep your systems operating at peak efficiency, minimising downtime and preventing costly issues before they arise.
Laptop Screen Repair
Our laptop screen repair service fixes cracked, dim, or unresponsive displays quickly and professionally to restore full functionality.