Fort Lauderdale computer repair services have seen it hundreds of times: A computer crashes and a customer panics, making a bad decision regarding where they take it to be repaired and paying more as a result.

Most people don't have a clue as to how to fix it so they seek their Ft. Lauderdale computer repair elsewhere. The question is whether the alleged professionals at some of the bigger chains know what they're doing.

With this Ft. Lauderdale computer repair question in mind, a local news station recently put a few chain store technicians to the test.

The results were not always pretty.

Over at Best Buy's Geek Squad, "Yowsers, I have never seen that before," said one tech. Terrific. At Circuit City's Fire Dog, "I really don't know what I'm doing," was the response of another supposed expert.

Even better: One computer repair expert determined that "this computer is in working order" but not before assessing a fee for the simple act of looking at it. The computer was not in working order, naturally.

The covert effort to expose these computer services' flaws began with the insertion of a jumper, or white plastic plug that short circuits computers' ability to see the hard drive. A competent tech could (and should) easily find and rectify the problem as soon as he or she opened the hard drive.

"The only thing I can suggest is that you contact Dell, because this is a Dell thing," said one Boca Raton tech support professional, never having run a free PC check or even taken an extended look at the hard drive.

Not surprisingly, one independent and much smaller Ft. Lauderdale computer repair service was able to find the problem (albeit after charging for a diagnostic test), within seconds of opening the hard drive.

"This was obvious. Someone pulled out the hard drive, put something on, and the computer wouldn't boot," was the exact reaction of the technician.

The long and short of it?

Wherever you live in South Florida, computer repair help should be the kind of thing you select the same way you might choose a physician.

Ask for references, do research and be careful with whoever you trust. Otherwise, what could be an simple enough Ft. Lauderdale computer repair task might cause you more headaches than you'd ever imagine.