Most repair shops tell you they’re experienced. Very few can show you the evidence. We can, because we kept the records.
This is a report drawn straight from our own workshop database — more than 15,000 individual repairs booked in since 2009, across more than 10,000 local customers in South West London. It’s not a survey, a guess, or a rewrite of someone else’s blog. It’s a count of what actually came through our door over 16 years. Here’s what it shows.
A quick, honest word on what this is
Before the numbers, one important caveat. This is a record of what people bring to a repair shop — not a picture of every fault that happens in the world. A £15 mouse that dies gets binned, not brought in, so it won’t appear here. A laptop that won’t turn on, or a MacBook with wine in the keyboard, absolutely does.
So read the numbers as “what makes people seek out a repair” — which is exactly the useful question if you’re weighing up whether your own problem is worth bringing in. Figures are rounded down, categories reflect how each job was logged, and because one machine can arrive with several faults, some counts overlap. We’ve flagged that where it matters.
Sixteen years, fifteen thousand machines
The headline first. Since 2009 we’ve logged more than 15,000 repair jobs from a base of 10,000-plus customers. That work started in Putney (SW15) — still comfortably our busiest patch — and spread out across South West London over the years:
| Area | Repairs on record | Repairs since |
|---|---|---|
| Putney & Roehampton (SW15) | 10,200+ | 2009 |
| Barnes (SW13) | 1,400+ | 2010 |
| Fulham (SW6) | 1,000+ | 2010 |
| Wandsworth (SW18) | 600+ | 2010 |
| Wimbledon & Merton (SW19) | 450+ | 2010 |
The pattern is a local business growing outward from its home postcode, one recommendation at a time — which, as you’ll see below, is exactly what the loyalty numbers say too.
The machines: laptops, and it isn’t close
The first thing the data tells you is about form factor, not fault:
| Device type | Share of all jobs |
|---|---|
| Laptops | ~78% |
| Desktops | ~10% |
| iMacs / all-in-ones | ~4% |
| Everything else (printers, tablets, other) | ~8% |
More than three in four machines we see are laptops. That tracks — laptops are what most people now own, they travel (so they get dropped, sat on and spilled on), and their all-in-one build means one fault takes the whole machine out of action. A desktop with a dead power supply is a quick swap; a laptop with a dead charging circuit is a bench job. It’s also why so much of our laptop repair work is board- and component-level rather than simple part swaps.
The faults we see most
Here’s the core of it — the fault categories that make up the bulk of our work, by number of jobs involved:
| Fault category | Jobs involving it |
|---|---|
| Won’t power on / won’t boot | 2,100+ |
| Windows / software problems | 1,600+ |
| Virus / malware | 1,400+ |
| Hard drive & SSD faults | 1,200+ |
| Slow performance | 1,200+ |
| Data recovery & backup | 1,100+ |
| Charging faults | 800+ |
| Cracked or damaged screens | 800+ |
| Liquid damage | 650+ |
One machine can appear in several rows — a liquid-damaged laptop that won’t power on and needs its data recovered counts in three — so these overlap by design.
A few things stand out:
“Won’t turn on” is the giant — and the most misunderstood. It’s our single largest category, and it hides a whole range of causes: a failing drive, a charging fault, tired RAM, or a genuine board problem. It’s the fault people most often assume is fatal and most often isn’t, which is why we wrote a separate breakdown of what “won’t boot” really means.
Malware never went away. Despite years of “antivirus is dead” takes, virus removal is a top-three category across our entire history — over 1,400 jobs. It’s overwhelmingly a Windows story, as our PC-versus-Mac fault breakdown shows.
Drives fail, and people lose things. Between failing storage and outright data recovery jobs, thousands of machines came to us with a storage problem — and almost none of the people who needed recovery had a working backup. If this report changes one thing you do, set up a backup today. It’s the cheapest insurance in computing.
The brands on our bench
Of the laptops where we could identify a make, Apple is the single most common — a little over one in five identifiable machines — ahead of HP and Dell, with Toshiba and Lenovo close behind and every other major brand featuring regularly.
Apple’s lead partly reflects South West London’s demographics, and partly that Mac owners tend to repair rather than replace. It’s why we invest in genuine board-level Apple work and MacBook repair rather than turning those jobs away — the local demand is clearly there.
The number we’re proudest of: people come back
Volume is one thing. Loyalty is better. Across our 16-year record of more than 9,000 distinct customers:
- More than 2,800 of them have come back to us more than once.
- 58% of all the work we’ve ever done has come from returning customers.
Put plainly: most of our jobs come from people who had already used us once and chose to return. For a business that has never relied on hard selling, that’s the figure that matters most — you don’t get repeat computer repair work by talking people into things. You get it by being straight with them the first time.
How fast: turnaround today
Historic job counts can’t tell you turnaround reliably, but our current workshop can. Across recently completed and invoiced jobs, our median turnaround is three days from booked-in to ready, with more than 4 in 10 jobs finished within two days and around one in eight completed same-day. Complex board-level and data-recovery work naturally takes longer; a screen or SSD job is often same- or next-day.
When: our busiest months
Sixteen years of dates reveal a genuine seasonal pattern. September is reliably our busiest month — it ran above the yearly average in 12 of the last 15 years — with October close behind. The back-to-school and back-to-work return, plus the first cold-weather power-ons of machines that sat idle over summer, brings a dependable late-year rush. If you’ve been putting off a repair, summer is the quiet window to book one in.
What this means for you
- A slow or “dying” laptop is usually fixable. The most common cause of a machine that feels finished is a failing drive — and an SSD upgrade transforms it.
- “Won’t turn on” is worth a diagnosis, not a panic. It’s rarely the worst-case fault, and even when a machine isn’t saveable, your data usually is.
- Back up before you need to. Data recovery is one of our most common — and most avoidable — jobs.
- Get a second opinion before replacing. If you’ve been quoted for a new machine or a big-ticket part, the odds are good a cheaper fix exists.
Get an honest diagnosis
If your laptop, Mac or PC is showing any of the faults above, we diagnose before we quote and tell you honestly whether a repair, an upgrade or a replacement is the right spend — the same way we have for 16 years and 15,000-plus machines.
Call 020 7610 0500, drop in to our Putney workshop (SW15), or use the contact form. You can also see the areas we cover across South West London.
About this report: every figure is drawn from PC Macgicians’ own workshop records, 2009–present. Numbers are rounded down and, where faults overlap, counted per job involved. We update the underlying data as our current workshop records grow.
