Complaint Review: Dono Repairs - Dollard-des-Ormeaux Quebec

I have an electronics repair shop in Lasalle called A to Z Electronics. I offer a videogame console repair service and while I'm able to do most jobs myself, I prefer to outsource the more difficult tasks to specialists. Playstation 3 motherboard repairs top the list, as fixing the Yellow Light of Death (YLoD) error is the most common problem, where the machine won't boot up.

I used to network with Blastlogic for this, but after getting burned by the owner Dave in early 2012 as detailed in a previous report, I shopped around for another repair technician. I found Dono Repairs soon afterwards which operated out of a fabric shop on Donegani in the West Island and spoke to the owner Mohammed. He charged less than Blastlogic (which I later learned was because Blastlogic outsourced their repairs to him, too) and assured me he had the right equipment (in this case an infrared workstation) to properly reflow a PS3 motherboard, as the heat gun technique commonly used is a band-aid solution at best and will fail after about a month or so.

After getting my first PS3 repair back from him, he advised me to let it run for no more than an hour and a half to two hours max per day for the first couple of weeks, ostensibly to help weld the connections properly. I found this odd, as the repair job was supposed to do that and the machine doesn't get hot enough under normal operating conditions to do that; it should be as good as new afterwards. I naively gave him the benefit of the doubt, which would later prove to be a mistake.

After a few repeated callbacks, it became clear to me that he didn't know how to fix them properly and had been lying about being properly equipped for the job. That advise he gave earlier about letting it run for a couple hours a day tops for the first two weeks was obviously a ruse to forestall it's inevitable breakdown after the one month guarantee he offered, even though the law in Quebec spells out a mandatory three month guarantee for professional repair services (which I've always complied with).

One customer had me fix his PS3. After a couple callbacks, he took it somewhere else and during a follow up I found out that that somewhere else was Dono Repairs. Mohammed had the nerve to charge the guy for the repair, even though he could see his signature on the machine, the unbroken security seal and the model and serial numbers to indicate that this is a machine that he had repaired recently, was untampered and within his warranty period no less. Not sure what happened after that.

I got refunded or otherwise compensated for my losses and servered ties with him.

A few years later, he has the nerve to show his face at my shop, all smiles like nothing's happened and looking to network with me. Needless to say, I didn't feel like humoring that a*****e and promptly showed him the door.

Fast forward to the present time, I just find out that he had moved out of the fabric shop and opened a storefront in Dollard-des-Ormeaux under the name Dono Electronics since 2016 (roughly the time of his last visit).

I can't avoid the suspicion that he plagiarized my business model (no doubt why he tried to get back into my good graces earlier), but several other nearby store offer the same services. I confirmed by phone that he works there and assuming all those glowing reviews aren't completely fake, it seems like he's hired or at least partnered with competent technicians. But he's still offering ridiculously low prices for PS3 motherboard repairs to the general public, which means he's still cutting corners.

I'd trust him as far as I can throw his fat a*s.