About Galvitech
At Galvitech PC Services in Northern Paarl, the technician who diagnoses your machine is the exact same specialist who quotes, completes, and personally guarantees the work. This hands-on approach ensures exceptional attention to detail, uncompromising professionalism, and affordable repair solutions tailored directly to your needs.
Owner and main technician
Cobus Galvin owns the business and does the technical work himself. He has been in tech and IT since the late 1990s. He does the diagnosis, the quoting and the repair, and he will tell you when something is not worth fixing rather than take the job on.
Pieter and Annalene handle the bookings and the phone from time to time, so when you drop a device off you may well deal with one of them rather than with Cobus. The technical work itself stays with him.
The workshop
62 Bosch, Northern Paarl, Paarl, 7646. Open Monday to Friday 08:00–17:00 and weekends 09:00–13:00. Most repairs are done on the bench at the workshop, and we can come out to you when the fault needs looking at where it sits.
What we do
The list is short on purpose. We would rather be the workshop that is genuinely good at the things it claims than the one that lists everything anyone has ever asked about. Each of these is work Cobus has done enough of to know the failure modes by heart.
- Computers, laptops, MacBooks, printers and consoles
- Laptop screens and batteries — done in-house
- MacBook board-level work — Reset Lab in Cape Town
- Insurance reports on request, at a fixed fee quoted beforehand
- VHS, vinyl, cassette and CD transfer to digital
How a repair actually works
Nothing starts until you agree to it. You drop the device off, or book a slot online, and Cobus diagnoses the fault. That diagnosis is written down and it costs you nothing.
You get a quote before any work begins, and that quote is the price. If opening the case reveals something worse than the symptom suggested, the job stops and you get a new quote rather than a surprise on the invoice. No decision gets made about your money without you.
Once you agree, the work is done, the machine goes back together, and it is tested before it leaves. Most straightforward work — RAM and SSD upgrades, clean-and-service, fan and thermal work, controller stick replacement, common screen and battery replacements — is finished the same day. Anything involving board-level work, liquid damage, or a part we have to source is quoted with a realistic time attached, and you hear from us either way.
The six-month warranty
Every repair carries a six-month warranty on the work. Not a token one, and not a blanket promise that covers damage which was already there when we opened the case. If the same fault comes back within six months because of something we did, we put it right at no charge.
It does not cover new damage, drops or spills after collection, or a fault that was present before the repair and that we told you about. Those conversations go into the quote, so there is no argument about it later.
We are comfortable putting six months on the work because the same person diagnoses it, repairs it and stands behind it. There is no handover to a contractor and nobody else to pass it to.
What to bring, and what helps
Bring the device, the charger and any case it lives in. If it still boots, photograph the exact error message before you close the lid — it saves real diagnosis time. If the machine has a BIOS or firmware password, write yes or no on the booking form. We never ask for the password itself, because we do not need it.
A backup before you drop off is always sensible. Where a drive still reads we can help recover from it, but every power-on of a failing disk risks what is left, so a drive making clicking noises or throwing bad sectors should come in sooner rather than later.
What we do not do
A few things sit outside what we can honestly offer, and we would rather say so than take the job and hope.
We do not attempt physical data recovery from a drive whose platters are damaged — that is a cleanroom discipline with different tools and equipment, and if that is what you need we will tell you straight and point you to someone who can. What we do instead is a deep logical scan of a drive that still spins, which recovers a great deal more than most people expect.
We also do not quote a price we have not looked at first. If opening the machine turns up something worse than the symptom suggested, we stop and talk to you before going any further.
Where we work
The workshop is in Northern Paarl, and most customers come in from Paarl and Paarl Central. We get steady work from Wellington, Drakenstein and Franschhoek too — the drop-off is the same either way.
Bookings and getting hold of us
You can book a drop-off slot online. Pick a day and a time that suits, tell us what you are bringing, and the booking is confirmed — the calendar we work from is the same one you are booking into, so a double-booking does not happen and you are not waiting on a reply to find out whether anyone is free.
If something is urgent, or you would rather just talk it through first, WhatsApp is usually the fastest way to reach us. Bring a photo of the fault or the error message if you have one. It is often enough to tell you whether it is worth repairing, and roughly what the job involves, before you have made the trip across town.
Your data
Repairing a device means handling your files and your passwords. That is written down, along with how long we keep things and which third parties touch them, in the privacy policy.