Their name says they aim to impress
And I have to sincerely confess
That I floated on air
As I watched them repair
My computer with low-cost finesse.

I'm issuing a geek alert to warn anyone who wishes to read further. A week ago, the fan on my Dell Dimension 4600 desktop computer began making noises akin to a threshing machine in a rocky field and I knew I'd have a problem on my hands soon. I opened up the computer, took out the fan, did a little research and found out I had a 92mm fan that attached to my CPU with a three pin connector. I also saw that they were being sold for around $30 on the Internet. Since I didn't want to wait, I began calling local computer repair stores.

The first place was closed on the weekend. The second was fairly certain they didn't have the part at the store near me. The third was Impress Computers and after hearing me describe the fan, they checked and said they had them in stock. I drove right over and waited about 10 minutes for them to help two customers in front of me. It's a small store, but they offer quite a range of services from selling ink cartridges and accessories to virus removal and disk recovery to hardware repair.

When it was my turn, we took off the cover, got the replacement part and quickly discovered it didn't have the correct three pin connector. Roland informed me they could hardwire it to the power supply but it would require an extra push of the F1 key every time I booted up because the CPU wouldn't know it was there. I didn't like that solution. No problem. Andrew to the rescue. He disappeared into the workshop for a few minutes and emerged triumphantly with a fan assembly he'd robbed from another system they were building. We took my machine to the back, booted it up and immediately ran into an error state. My CMOS battery had died. I hadn't noticed this myself because my machine had been running continuously for quite a while. Andrew rummaged around and stole a battery from another machine and - presto! - I was good to go.

The best part of the experience follows. Cost of the used fan: $10. Cost of the battery: $0. Labor (1/2 hour's worth): $0. I was so pleased with the result that I felt a bit guilty walking out of there after paying them only $10. I asked them to throw in generic B&W and color cartridges for my HP printer which cost me just over $30. Total bill with tax: $44.36.

Back home after reconnecting all sorts of devices to USB ports and turning on the power, I let out a happy sigh as the fan spun up and softly hummed away. Impress had definitely lived up to their name. I'll be back (hopefully, not too often)!