Room 036 of building 8 is home to the Repair Lair. The Repair Lair is a repair service on campus that focuses mainly on computers.
With student technicians and the help of some faculty and staff, the Repair Lair fixes most personal devices such as laptops, desktops and tablets.
The service is free and available to Sinclair students, faculty and staff. They focus on software issues such as viruses and malware.
Tom McMurty is a faculty administrator that helps manage and supervise the students working in the lair.
A common problem affecting students, faculty and staff is malware and viruses, which the Repair Lair helps eliminate.
McMurty describes the difference between them as: “viruses infect the host without the intent of killing it, malware just doesn’t care.”
The Repair Lair can also help with activating new computers or giving old ones a tune up. If an older model is running slow they can clean up the hard drive to improve performance,
McMurty described it as “Getting the junk outta the attic.”
The lair can also do data transfers from an old computer to a new one, and help with some hard drive data recovery in certain situations.
“We can’t fix everything but you can always ask.” McMurty said.
Eric Renegar is a professor of computer information systems at Sinclair who works with the student technicians in the lair. Most of the student workers have taken his courses, and he says working in the Repair Lair is a way for them to apply the theories from the classroom to real life clients and computers.
There are several reasons Renegar and McMurty think the Repair Lair is important. It provides the student workers with real experience they can apply to future jobs, and it gives Sinclair student faculty and staff access to good quality repair work.
Renegar said his favorite thing about the Repair Lair is how many times they have been able to get students back in class. He thinks having a personal device to do homework can be very important for a student’s success in some cases.
“I have heard that Sinclair students can sometimes be one flat tire away from dropping out,” Renegar said. “We provide a service that gets students back to doing their homework at home as soon as possible.”
McMurty values how quick the lair can provide service to people who need it. For example, they had a student come in and her touchpad wasn’t working. They opened the computer up right there and fixed the problem, enabling her to be back up and running in just a few minutes.
McMurty said one of his favorite moments at the Repair Lair was when they opened up a computer to fix the hard drive and found a full sized Cheeto lost in there.
The Repair Lair was originally started by Ken Hook 7 years ago under a different name, Students Correcting Open-door PC Emergencies (or SCOPE) lab.
However when Hook died McMurty started volunteering for the lab and the name was changed to the Repair Lair, since no one could ever remember what SCOPE stood for.
The nature of the Repair Lair changed some as well. A new change was implementing tracking systems to log what was brought in and by who, and recognizing what problems had a reasonable chance of being fixed.
McMurty has been a student faculty and staff member at Sinclair, and has seen the turnover of new students every few years. As Renegar put it, “Sinclair has a two year memory.”
The Repair Lair is open in the afternoon every Monday through Thursday.
Every 16 weeks the Repair Lair gets a new batch of student workers and they have to start over with new ideas and methods, to find what will work for the new crew. However this hasn’t stopped them from providing a quality computer repair service on campus.
Cerridwyn Kuykendall
Reporter