Monday, 9:04am. A laptop that worked perfectly on Friday won’t turn on. The first question everyone asks is “how much will the repair cost?”
After 220,000 repairs, we can tell you: that’s the wrong first question. The repair is usually the cheapest part of the whole event.
Quick answer: The repair bill is rarely the expensive part of a dead work laptop. The lost working day costs more, and whatever was only on that machine costs more again. One honest hour spent on backups, a spare machine and a password manager prevents most of it.
Do the maths on the dead day
Take an employee on £35,000 a year. That’s roughly £135 per working day — paid whether their laptop works or not. Now add what they were actually supposed to do that day: the quote that didn’t go out, the client who didn’t get a reply, the invoice that didn’t get chased.
A typical hardware repair might cost less than that one lost day. The laptop is the cheap bit. The day is expensive. And if the machine sat in a drawer for a week while someone “looked into options”, you’ve paid for the repair five times over before anyone touched a screwdriver.
The part that surprises people
Here’s what twelve years at the bench have taught us: when a business laptop dies, the panic is almost never about the laptop.
It’s about what was only on that laptop. The spreadsheet that was never in the shared folder. The email archive. The password to the one system nobody else can access. A £300 machine becomes a £3,000 problem not because of the hardware, but because of what was trapped inside it.
Most “dead” laptops, by the way, aren’t dead. A machine that won’t power on is very often a charging fault, a battery issue or a power circuit problem — repairable, frequently at board level, with the storage left where it is. Even a failed drive can often be recovered. But “often” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and recovery takes time you may not have on a deadline.
What you can do yourself — today, for free
None of this requires an IT department. It requires one honest hour:
- Check that your backup actually backs up. Not “we have OneDrive” — open it and check the folders people really work in are syncing. The most common thing we hear during data recovery is “I thought that was backed up.”
- Keep one spare laptop configured and ready. A modest machine that any team member can pick up within ten minutes is the cheapest business continuity plan ever invented.
- Get passwords out of people’s heads and browsers. A shared password manager means a dead laptop doesn’t lock you out of your own systems.
- Act on warning signs. A battery that swells, a fan that’s suddenly loud, a machine that takes five minutes to boot — these are the laptop telling you what’s coming. A small fix this month beats a lost day next month. Our guide to swollen laptop batteries explains the most urgent one.
- Know your repairer before you need one. The worst time to google “laptop repair near me” is the morning it happens.
What you probably shouldn’t do yourself
The steps above cover a team of two or three. Past five people, the honest answer is that nobody remembers to check the backups every week, nobody watches which drives are reporting errors, and the spare laptop quietly gets absorbed as someone’s second machine.
That layer — monitoring devices so failures stop being surprises, verifying backups actually ran, having someone on call when things break — is a system, not a task. It’s also a different job from ours: we fix what’s broken. For businesses that want the layer above that, our sister brand Evolfe provides IT support for London businesses — the ongoing side, so that the next dead laptop is an inconvenience rather than an event.
If it’s already happened
If you’re reading this with a dead laptop on the desk: don’t keep pressing the power button, don’t open it up, and if data matters, stop charging it and bring it in. Diagnosis usually takes one to three working days and board-level repairs one to five, and “this one isn’t worth fixing” is an answer we give honestly rather than quietly billing you for the attempt.
One thing to say out loud when you hand the machine over: if what is on it matters more than the machine itself, tell us before we start. That changes how we approach the board, and it is sometimes a data recovery job rather than a repair. Details on our business repair services page.
Fixfactor has repaired laptops, phones and tablets in London since 2014 — 220,000+ repairs, from screen swaps to component-level board work and data recovery.
