The Last Thing You Want Is A Suspicious Computer Repair

While biking home one winter evening, I take a bit of a spill. I’m not injured, but the bag holding my laptop hits the ground hard, and once I’m home, I find the laptop to be dead; pressing the power button does nothing, even with the laptop plugged in. A bit of troubleshooting later, I’m pretty sure the hard impact broke something in the laptop’s motherboard, so once I’ve scraped up the necessary cash, I remove the SSD for safekeeping and take the laptop over to a place in town that does computer repair.

I walk in and tell the tech that I’ve got a laptop that needs a new motherboard. They give me a form to complete, and I’ve filled out the first few items when I come across a field reading “Password”.

(A note of context for the uninitiated: one of the basic tenets of IT security is to never, EVER give out your account password to ANYONE, no matter what.]

I bring this to the tech’s attention.

Tech: “Yes, you need to put down the password for your user account on the laptop.”

Me: “This is just a hardware repair; it doesn’t require any sort of operating system access.”

But they keep insisting that they need my account password.

Me: “Is there someone else I can talk to?”

I end up in front of a senior tech. The senior tech reiterates that they need my account password.

Senior Tech: “It’s so we can get into the laptop once the new motherboard’s installed and run a piece of our software to verify that the new motherboard’s actually working.”

Me: “Simply getting to the login screen in the first place would already be proof that the new motherboard works. All I need you to do is replace the motherboard; I’ll take care of any software aspects.”

Senior Tech: “We can’t replace the motherboard without logging in afterward and running our software, and we need your password for that.”

I repeated that all I was asking them to do was replace the physical motherboard and that I would take care of everything else, but they still refused to replace the motherboard without having my password on hand.

I ended up having to shell out considerably more money to buy another laptop of the same model and swap the old laptop’s SSD into it. (Fortunately, I use Ubuntu, so the process of swapping OS drives between computers is essentially painless.)

The place I went to to try to get the first laptop’s motherboard replaced — a franchise of a larger chain — has since gone out of business, with a different store taking over the building. Given their appalling attitude toward computer security, I’m honestly not surprised!