PC Express in Seekonk a True Crash Course

It wasn’t Todd Ouellet’s intention to start his store PC Express in Seekonk, but life sometimes has funny ways of working itself out.

Ouellet said he has always been playing with computers, but before he started the store he was running a recording studio with a friend of his for music. Ouellet, also a musician, was working with his partner to modernize and digitize their studio, when none of the computer equipment worked.

“We decided to say screw it and teach ourselves a crash course in computers,” he said. “We set a lab, bought components to build computers and break them on each other and learn how to fix them.”

This seemingly combative way of learning got Ouellet into his business today.

“It was serendipity,” he said.  “We got our studio working optimally, everything was the way it should have been out of the box.”

Ouellet said he and his friend started working on their friends’ computers and word got out they knew how to fix most computer problems.

“It was word of mouth,” he said. “The next thing you know we’re doing more computer work than recording. It was like we were stepping over diamonds to pick up gold. We took it form there and decided it was the business to be in.”

Ouellet said they started out doing house calls and on location work, which was the standard for the time but not all that efficient, since a lot of the work was waiting for a system to reboot or processes to run.

“It’s a different model working on one person at a time,” he said. “Here we can do like ten people at a time; you know do something else while you’re waiting for another thing to finish.”

Ouellet said he plans to return to working with music as well, and is renting out his large selection of public announcement equipment at the shop as well.

“I still occasionally play at piano bars too,” he said.

Ouellet said most of the worst repair jobs were from people who had received a computer as a gift from a friend or family member.

“One of the machines that came in literally caught on fire because of too much dust in it,” he said. “One woman had a bottle cap stuck in her CD drive and couldn’t figure out how to open up the CD player so she opened it up and put the CD in and wondered why it wouldn’t play.”

Ouellet said there are some exceptions, but most of the computers he sees have pretty mundane problems from viruses to malware and spyware.

“It’s people going to the wrong places on the Web,” he said.

PC Express is located at 550 Central Ave.