• Tekserve

  119 West 23rd Street; 212-929-3645

  Amnet PC Solutions

  229 East 53rd Street; 212-593-2425

  Macs and PCs, being different religions, require their own houses of worship, and for the Apple zealot, Tekserve is St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Or maybe Lourdes, if you need a miracle.) After fifteen years of bouncing around the neighborhood, the legendary shop has finally settled into a huge ground-floor space down the street from the Chelsea Hotel. It’s retained its signature quirky, friendly, and, yes, even sexy atmosphere: vintage Coke machine, antique waiting-room chairs perfect for “What’s on your iPod?” flirting, a screening area where you can watch movies while you wait. The staff’s made up of hipster nerds, all refreshingly free of help-desk arrogance. Drop your computer off or wait around while you get a diagnosis (estimates are free); house calls are a minimum $240, in case you don’t want to haul that coffee-soaked PowerMac G5 across town. As for the PC world, it has as many branches as Protestantism—everyone seems to want something different—but longevity is one measure of success, and Amnet PC Solutions has been around since 1991, a century in Microsoft years. Don’t let this unremarkable-looking hole-in-the-wall fool you: Unlike most PC repair places, Amnet will handle data recovery and the hard-to-pinpoint, impossibly annoying software conflicts that are so typical of the Windows experience, as well as tackle operating systems of yesteryear as far back as Windows 3.1 and DOS. And they, like Tekserve, make house calls (starting at $95).

From the 2004 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine