Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Altrincham and the surrounding Greater Manchester area.
Roughly 32 minutes and 8 miles separate Altrincham from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Sale, Hale and Bowdon and the wider Greater Manchester area.
Altrincham is about eight miles south-west of us via the A56 and M56 — roughly 15 minutes outside rush hour. Most people drop devices in on the way past rather than posting them.
Altrincham runs on professional services, a well-known market-led town centre revival, and a concentration of small consultancies and creative businesses. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: consultancy laptops, design and architectural practice files, and home machines from the residential belt through Hale and Bowdon. Altrincham work skews toward small professional practices — two to twenty people, everything on one NAS, and no IT department to call.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Altrincham runs on professional services, a well-known market-led town centre revival, and a concentration of small consultancies and creative businesses, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is consultancy laptops, design and architectural practice files, and home machines from the residential belt through Hale and Bowdon — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
Altrincham work skews toward small professional practices — two to twenty people, everything on one NAS, and no IT department to call.
Alongside that there is the ordinary run of household work that every area produces: laptops that stopped starting, external drives full of photographs, camera cards formatted by mistake. Those are from £250 to £300 +VAT and are frequently the quickest jobs we handle. Business and array work from Altrincham and across Greater Manchester starts from £500 +VAT.
The same whether you walk it in or send it by courier.
Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm — or insured post from Altrincham. Send the bare drive rather than the whole machine where you can.
The fault is classified — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — because that decides the route, the price and the realistic odds.
One figure, agreed before anything is touched, and it does not move afterwards. If software would do it, or nothing can be recovered, you hear that instead.
Imaged read-only, rebuilt from the copy, verified by opening files rather than counting them, and returned on fresh media with free shipping back to Altrincham.
Because a wasted trip helps nobody.
Phones and tablets. Not something we take on. Modern handsets are encrypted in a way that makes third-party recovery impractical, and if photographs are what matter the realistic route is iCloud, Google Photos or a backup rather than a laboratory.
Soldered Mac storage on a dead board. On T2 and Apple Silicon machines the flash is soldered and encrypted by the security chip. Once that board fails nobody recovers it — not us, not Apple, not anyone quoting four figures for board-level extraction.
Encryption without the key. BitLocker, FileVault and hardware-encrypted drives open with the credentials and by no other route. Worth checking with your IT department first — the key is escrowed far more often than people expect.
Send the device over with a short account of what happened to it. The diagnostic costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed in writing before anything is opened.
Nothing can begin until the device is on the bench, which makes this the only step that needs anything from you. Pack it properly, put your details in with it, and send it over. What follows is a free diagnostic and a written figure, in that order.
Posting it? Use something tracked and insured — whatever is on the drive is worth considerably more than the postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and it still wants packing as above for the journey.
Tell us what the device is, what it is doing, and anything already tried — an engineer will come back with a realistic view of the odds and a price band, before you commit to posting anything.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
Yes — Altrincham and the surrounding area including Sale, Hale and Bowdon. We’re about eight miles away via the A56 and M56, roughly 15 minutes. Drop-off or insured post both start the same free 48-hour diagnostic.
From £250 plus VAT for cards and USB media, from £300 plus VAT for a single drive, laptop or Mac with removable storage, £550 plus VAT flat for a Fusion Drive, and from £500 plus VAT for RAID, NAS and servers — each quoted in writing after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
The diagnostic is normally back inside 48 hours. From approval a single drive usually completes in three to four working days; array and donor-part work takes longer and you get the timescale with the quote.
The drive alone where you can — cheaper to post, quicker to start, and any computer shop in Altrincham will remove it in minutes. External units are the exception and should come complete with their enclosure.
You pay nothing on most jobs. The diagnostic is free and the majority of our work is no fix, no fee — forensic examination, CCTV and data destruction are the exceptions, and we say so before you commit.
Yes. Data stays in the UK, work is carried out in-house rather than subcontracted, NDAs are signed as standard for business work, and working copies are destroyed after a retention period you set.
The diagnostic costs nothing, most jobs carry no fee unless the data comes back, and the bench is 8 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.