I remember (decades ago) buying a garage door opener at sears, and they offered to install it for $99.
I sort of hemmed and hawed and said ok.
When the guy came by to install it, it was kind of amazing. he opened the box quickly with a box cutter, and started unwrapping stuff. Stuff that was needed came out, extras were discarded into the lid of the box, all within about a minute.
He had a special pole with a carpet covered T at the top to help get the old rail down safely and raise the new one. He ran all the lines quickly and efficiently. Lines that were too long were wrapped around a screwdriver to form a pigtail and efficiently run them with some tension the right length.
I think it was done in ~ 20 minutes and worked right the first time.
Simply amazing to see sometime who has done it before and really knows what they're doing.
Made me question every install I would ever do after that.
They did the same thing with a garbage disposal install a year or two later. ba-da-boom, done.
And that is why I don't build my own PCs even though I can. I build a new PC about once every three or four years on average I suppose [1]. In that time processor sockets have changed, RAM has changed, sometimes other things.
I select the parts, but pay the vendor or someone local to assemble and test it. Not only do they do it every week (if not every day), if some part is DoA they have others on hand to swap in and out to find out which part is the problem, but I don't, see: everything changed since I built the last one 5 years before.
[1] 2009 i7-860, 2014 i7-4790K, 2016 i7-6700K (had moved countries, didn't take the old PC, just the SSD), 2019 TR 2990WX (again had moved countries, taking just the SSD), 2024 i9-13900HX laptop (beats the TR in every way, plus sips power and is portable).
If I was sure they were going to use good parts, I'd do the same.
I bought my current PC from a company that seems pretty good, and targets gamers with medium-high budgets.
The "liquid cooled" cpu cooler died after being bumped with a vacuum, and I had to replace it.
With that one thing that I was forced to do myself, I had to learn a lot about the system that I'd already have known if I'd ordered the parts myself. Worse, they no longer had a list of the exact parts in the system on their site. I had to pull things apart to find out what they were.
I'll be making my own PC from scratch again next time.
I don't mean a small vacuum. I mean a house vacuum, for the floor. They just rammed the computer. It caused the CPU Cooler to make a ticking sound, which I found was a pretty common thing for that cooler. I replaced it with a standard fan cooler instead and it's been fine.
Building a PC is just the right amount of challenge (for me). It's fun. I'd do it for my friends, if they let me. And wanted to spend one or two grand every other year. It's just challenging enough to be fun but not so challenging it's actually hard.
I sort of hemmed and hawed and said ok.
When the guy came by to install it, it was kind of amazing. he opened the box quickly with a box cutter, and started unwrapping stuff. Stuff that was needed came out, extras were discarded into the lid of the box, all within about a minute.
He had a special pole with a carpet covered T at the top to help get the old rail down safely and raise the new one. He ran all the lines quickly and efficiently. Lines that were too long were wrapped around a screwdriver to form a pigtail and efficiently run them with some tension the right length.
I think it was done in ~ 20 minutes and worked right the first time.
Simply amazing to see sometime who has done it before and really knows what they're doing. Made me question every install I would ever do after that.
They did the same thing with a garbage disposal install a year or two later. ba-da-boom, done.