Tucked in the back of an office building on Lisbon Street in Lewiston, the work space Jim and his two full-time employees share is organized and efficient with monitors mounted on walls with dedicated workstations. On a recent day a half-dozen or so computers are split open, with wires and components unplugged or plugged into external components that are running diagnostics or uploading data. To the outsider, it looks like chaos, but not to the experts. Among the computers being fixed is a laptop, split open while a screen is swapped out, which is one of the most frequent repairs. “We get a fair amount of component failure and viruses,” says Fish, “but these days one of the biggest issues customers have is spyware that not only slows your computer down, but can steal vital information from you.”
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- Three used video cards taken out of computers are similar, but different. The components used in a video card determine how fast images appear on a monitor. A faster video card (or graphics card, as it is also called) is recommended for users playing games, working with large photos, graphics or video.
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- Action Computer Services President Jim Fish is reflected in a hard drive.
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- A penny sits on a small section of a mother board to show the scale of how small the components are. The motherboard is the central printed circuit board that holds many of the crucial components of the system, providing connectors for other peripherals. It is also called the main board, system board or, on Apple computers, the logic board.
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- Jim Fish demonstrates how his custom-designed dust remover works. The insides of computers are often coated with dust, so he designed a stainless steel enclosure with a turntable. A vacuum sucks away the dust that is blown off with a nozzle of compressed air.
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- There are several containers with hundreds of various size screws used to install hardware in the computers at Action Computer Services in Lewiston.
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- Dozens of different sized and shaped screwdrivers and other tools are necessary to work on the many components made by various manufacturers.
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- The inside of a desktop computer is just a jumble of wires, circuits and other confusing stuff to the untrained eye.
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