Free 48-hour diagnostic, one fixed price agreed in writing before anything is opened, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Offshore energy and tourism in unusual combination, with the outer harbour and its energy support base at one end of the town and the seasonal economy of the seafront at the other.
Roughly 105 minutes and 82 miles separate Great Yarmouth from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Gorleston, Caister-on-Sea, Bradwell and the wider Norfolk area.
Eighty-two miles north-east via the A11 and A47. Post is the sensible route and we cover return shipping.
Great Yarmouth runs on offshore energy and tourism, an unusual pairing that produces two very different sorts of job. From the energy side come survey data, vessel systems and the engineering records of the firms servicing the rigs and turbines. From the tourism side come the seasonal businesses — booking and till systems, site CCTV, and the peculiar urgency of a caravan park or attraction that loses its records in March with a season about to start.
Offshore energy and tourism in unusual combination, with the outer harbour and its energy support base at one end of the town and the seasonal economy of the seafront at the other.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Offshore energy and seasonal tourism, in roughly equal measure. Survey and vessel data on one side; booking, EPOS and CCTV systems on the other. As at Lowestoft, salt-air corrosion on coastal media is a recurring and genuine complication.
Before you do anything else. If it is a seasonal business and the season is about to start, say so. It changes what we prioritise.
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 Great Yarmouth and across Cambridgeshire starts from £500 +VAT.
The same whether you walk it in or send it by courier.
Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm — or insured post from Great Yarmouth. 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 Great Yarmouth.
The distance from here makes a wasted postal round trip worse than usual, so these are worth checking first.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy the files off before you pack anything. A disk you can read does not need a laboratory, and posting it here would be a week wasted.
The files are in a backup you forgot about. Cloud version history, Time Machine, Previous Versions, a copy emailed to somebody. Check all four before you post anything at this distance.
The media is old but undamaged. Obsolete does not mean broken. Sometimes the answer is a reader rather than a recovery, and we will say so on the phone rather than after you have sent it.
Your BitLocker or FileVault key exists. On a work machine it is almost certainly held centrally. One question to your IT contact resolves more of these than any technical work we do.
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 01223 655015.
Compass House, Vision Park, Cambridge CB24 9AD, Monday to Friday 9am to 5:30pm. We’re about eighty-two miles away via the A11 and A47, roughly 105 minutes. Or post it insured — return shipping is free either way.
We can give you the band immediately — the published prices start at £250 plus VAT for cards and £300 for a single drive. The exact figure is fixed in writing after the free 48-hour diagnostic, and it does not move afterwards.
Switch it off and leave it off. Clicking means the heads cannot find their servo data, and every further power-on risks scoring the surface. How long it ran after the first noise affects the result more than anything we do.
Regularly. NDAs signed as standard, one named contact from diagnostic to delivery, invoicing rather than card payment for established firms, and a written account of what failed for insurers or auditors.
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.
Occasionally, on a logical fault with healthy hardware dropped in early. Physical recoveries cannot be compressed that far — priority handling moves you to the front of the queue but cannot make a failing drive read faster.
The diagnostic costs nothing, most jobs carry no fee unless the data comes back, and the bench is 11 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.