I got a call from a local TV reporter looking to do some kind of sting operation against local computer repair shops. The broad idea is to bring them computers in some (known) state of failure and see whether they actually fix them or whether they scam you.

The obvious idea I had was to leverage my wife's slowly-dying laptop hard drive (now replaced with a shiny new one that works great) and see whether they waste lots of time on other things or whether they zero in on, say, the massive pile of disk errors in the event log. Of course, that disk is only going to get worse as each repair shop pokes at it.

Any other ideas for undercover computer repair shop tests?