ASHEVILLE - Reeta Wolfsohn was in a panic.

At first she was having a hard time turning off her desktop PC, then it became difficult to even boot up the machine.

She spent hours on the phone with Microsoft support technicians, racking up dollars per minute, only to be told she should reformat her machine.

But Wolfsohn was wary of losing all her data.

"My life's on that machine," said the consultant and writer who runs her own company, Femonomics Institute, which helps women with economic issues.

So Wolfsohn hung up on Microsoft and called a local company, Computer Mechanix.

Eric Jacobson, 26, and Woody Feffer, 25, had been playing and tinkering with computers since they were kids.

They've fried their share of motherboards, made their mistakes and built their own computers from scratch.

They also built a solid business plan for their company, which they launched in March 2002 out of the basement of Feffer's house.

The basement is only the workshop, since Jacobson and Feffer make house calls.

Rather than make people bring in their broken computers for expensive and lengthy repairs, why not go to them and fix the computers on the spot, the partners asked?

And why not speak English, instead of "techno-babble," as Jacobson calls it.

Jacobson, who graduated from UNC Asheville in 1999 and earned a master's degree at Syracuse University with a dissertation on violence in video games, is responsible for the software side.

Feffer, who attended UNC Asheville, handles the hardware problems.

Between them, Jacobson and Feffer figure they have 25 years of experience in computers.

Whatever the problem, the computer guys like to give their customers options for repairs.

"We can put a Band-Aid on it, or if you want it to run perfectly like the day you bought it, we can do that," said Feffer.

While residential customers have been their bread and butter so far, Computer Mechanix is finding more business clients as smaller companies outsource their information technology needs.

They've recently moved into installation and maintenance of servers, signing a deal with the Canadian company Net Integration Technologies. Working over the Internet, the duo has gotten new clients from as far away as Florida and Portland, Ore.

For now the most common complaint they get from customers concerns computer viruses.

"If you really think you have a virus, nine times out of 10 you do. But we've never had a machine where we couldn't pull the data off it," Jacobson said.

For that, Wolfsohn was so grateful she hugged Jacobson and Feffer for fixing her computer.

"They're reliable, responsible and reasonable," she said.

And she also appreciated that they spoke English instead of jargon when discussing her problem.

"I knew more when they left, and I had my computer back," Wolfsohn said

Contact Neal at 232-5970 or DNeal@CITIZEN-TIMES.com.

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