Recently made a trip down memory lane to the famous Sim Lim Square to fix my wife's old laptop (so I can take over it, haha). It's really different from its heyday when it was bustling with people, before the days of online shopping. As Dave (my old PC fixer who is no longer there) put it, it's a ghost town now.

Spotted some familiar names like Fuwell, Cybermind, LASER, Bizgram, but basically the other shops have pretty much changed. A lot more consumer stuff like mobile phone accessories shops and so on.

Anyway, what I really enjoyed, I guess, was the feeling that I wouldn't get scammed as an old timer. As opposed to many other things in life (including my day job lol) where I hardly know anything. Negotiated down the price of a SSD and its installation and CMOS battery replacement (things that in theory (really very theoretical) I could do myself but I really don't have the tools or agility or time to pry open hidden screws any more...).

I went to trawl some shops to unsuccessfully find a 4060 Ti 16GB. Also wanted to find Dave at his shop to talk shop but since he WFH nowadays we had a nice Whatsapp chat about the old days and I received invaluable advice that the new 5060 16GB was coming out soon so better to hold out for it.

There was also a small miscom because the repair shop boss who I was conversing with over Whatsapp (and not in the shop) told me something different from the repair shop boy who was doing the actual repair. To his great credit the repair boy owned the mistake which involved giving me more service than what I asked for, involving installing windows (he said it was free, but his boss wanted to charge). Kudos to him but less kudos to his boss who basically went on the "If I suffer I will make you suffer" route by ordering him to uninstall the work he already did. It's actually easy work and she could have just left it.

The human touch, wonder if the newer generation will still have it...