Eddie Williams, a junior film and video production major, was relieved to hear that Point Park University now has on-campus computer repair resources known as the Computer Service Center (CSC).
“It would be easier than going a mile out of Downtown to get it fixed, and it would be faster, especially for students living off campus,” Williams said.
Junior English and secondary education major Becky Pacek recently had to ship her laptop for repairs. She said she was lucky she had an older laptop to get her through the time that she waited for her laptop to return, which took more than two weeks.
The CSC, located in room 403 in Academic Hall, offers Point Park students free diagnostics for software and hardware. Other services advertised in a mass e-mail, sent March 36, include operating system restoration, data recovery and backup, driver reinstallation, hardware installation, application installation and removal, hard drive replacement with basic data backup and recovery and virus and malicious spyware removal.
CSC employee Josh Smith said in an e-mail interview that students used to turn to the Technology Services Help Desk for diagnostics, particularly for virus infections, but the IT employees could not repair laptops due to liability constraints. Smith said that this common scenario led to the opening of the CSC.
“Once we decided to further investigate the possibility of offering these services to students, we began looking at and visiting other institutions that had implemented similar service centers to learn from their experiences. It was decided that the best way to implement this was as an auxiliary service that remains separate from the IT Help Desk,” Smith said.
Smith lists three reasons why students should choose the Center above other technology service providers: convenience, price and the Computer Purchasing Program (CPP).
“One of the primary issues that students contact the CSC about is virus-related issues,” Smith said. “Best Buy advertises a fee of $199.99 for in-store virus and spyware removal. The CSC fee for this same service is $30 an hour, and in most cases it won’t take more than one [or] two hours for this type of repair.”
The CPP offers business-class Apple laptops and bundles at a discounted price to students, faculty and staff. Bundles include a four-year warranty, Microsoft Office, antivirus protection on Lenovo notebooks, and extras like an Ethernet cable, laptop locking cable, and a 4-gigabyte flash drive. A 10 percent discount is also available for non-warranty services on computers purchased through the CPP.
“Since warranty work normally takes a few days for the shipment of parts, we have free loaner laptops available for students, staff and faculty to use while their own computer is undergoing warranty repairs,” Smith said. “This is a huge benefit to both the Computer Service Center and the Computer Purchasing Program.”
For more information on new services, contact the CSC at CSC@pointpark.edu or by phone at (412) 392-6141.
Technology Services, located on the same floor, offers students and faculty assistance with Point Park’s online portals like Blackboard, PointWeb and the university e-mail system. Technology Services also operates the on-campus computer labs, and supports the wireless Internet network. The IT Help Desk can be reached by phone at (412) 392-3494, or by e-mail at helpdesk@pointpark.edu.
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