What are the opening hours?

Monday 12am - 12am Tuesday 12am - 12am Wednesday 12am - 12am Thursday 12am - 12am Friday 12am - 12am Saturday 12am - 12am

https://www.affordablecomputerrepair.us/

Affordable Computer Repair, 509 W Mission Avenue, Bellevue, NE (2026)

09/03/2026

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09/03/2026

# Part 8 – From Trash Trucks to PayPal

In 1995, I left the financial industry.

It wasn't because I had some carefully planned career change in mind. It was much simpler than that.

I needed to make money, and I needed to make it fast.

There is one moment from that time that I will never forget.

My kids had found a dollar and asked if they could use it to buy bread.

That hit me hard.

When your children are asking if they can spend a dollar they found so the family can have bread, titles, careers, and appearances stop mattering very quickly.

I had a family depending on me.

I needed to provide.

So I started looking for work that would put money in my pocket immediately.

What better way than driving a garbage truck?

I went to work for Watts Trucking, picking up garbage for the City of Omaha.

It was certainly a long way from the financial world I had just left, but I wasn't worried about what anyone thought about it. I had children to feed, and there was honest money to be made.

I only worked for Watts for about three months before Deffenbaugh received the new City of Omaha trash contract.

I applied with them.

During my interview, they actually told me I was overqualified to be a driver.

They were probably right.

But driving was where the money was.

So that was exactly where I wanted to be.

I had no idea that before long, driving a garbage truck would become one of the smaller parts of my job.

The new Omaha trash contract was crazy.

The City had very specific requirements about what Deffenbaugh was allowed to pick up, what we were supposed to leave behind, and how everything had to be documented.

The penalties could become enormous.

At one point, the City was charging Deffenbaugh more than $70,000 a month in contract infractions.

Some of the fines seemed almost ridiculous.

One example involved black trash bags.

If we picked up a black trash bag, Deffenbaugh could be fined $300 per bag.

If we left the bag sitting on the curb, the fine was only $75.

But if we left the bag, properly tagged it, and could prove that the tag had been placed there, the fine was zero.

That sounded like a problem I could solve.

So I accepted the challenge.

Deffenbaugh allowed me to build a Microsoft Access database to track the tags and document what was happening on the routes.

They even gave me three people whose job was to enter the tag information into the system.

Think about that for a moment.

I had been hired to drive a garbage truck because that was where I could make the money I needed to support my family.

Now I was building a computer database to help protect a major city contract.

And it worked.

By the end of the 1990s, there was trash sitting all over parts of Omaha.

People accused Deffenbaugh of not doing its job.

In one sense, they were right.

We weren't picking some of it up.

But there was a reason.

The difference was that now we could prove that those bags had been properly tagged according to the contract.

The City couldn't force us to pick them up, and they couldn't fine us when we could prove that we had followed the rules.

Eventually, around 2000, the City had enough.

They essentially told Deffenbaugh to just pick everything up and they would stop issuing the fines.

The battle was over.

The system had done exactly what it was supposed to do.

My job in that area was basically finished.

My boss ended up getting a brand-new pickup truck.

I got nothing.

At the time, we had five children.

I wasn't asking for anything extravagant. I simply asked for a small raise to help support my growing family.

They turned me down.

So I left.

Once again, I didn't realize it at the time, but what felt like another disappointment was pushing me toward the next chapter of my life.

My next opportunity was with a company called X.com.

Most people today would know it by the name it eventually became famous for:

PayPal.

I originally interviewed for a position as an Access Database specialist.

After what I had done at Deffenbaugh, it seemed like a natural fit.

But before I was hired, the company decided to move away from Access and toward SQL.

The position I had interviewed for disappeared.

Instead, they offered me a job in Customer Service.

I took it.

I was on the phones for about two weeks.

Then someone noticed me.

I was selected to help PayPal set up its fraud department.

I spent about eight months working there before I finally made my way into the IT Department.

Once I got into IT, I became responsible for the company's Kana email system.

That became one of the biggest technical accomplishments of my career.

I was able to automate much of PayPal's email operation.

The automation became efficient enough that the company was able to close its India facility that had been handling much of that work.

The savings were approximately $1.6 million.

For that accomplishment, I received a very nice raise.

At the time, it felt like recognition.

I had solved a major problem, saved the company a substantial amount of money, and was being rewarded for it.

Looking back, however, there may have been another side to that success.

When companies begin cutting expenses, the people with the larger salaries tend to become more noticeable.

Ironically, the raise I received for saving the company money may have later put a target on my back when it came time to start trimming the fat.

During this period, our family was living in Oakland, Nebraska.

We had purchased the old Rock School on Highway 32 and renovated it into our home.

It sat on about an acre of land.

Turning an old school into a home for our family was another adventure all by itself, but it became our home during an important period of our lives.

Not long after I started working for PayPal, eBay purchased the company.

About a year later, changes began happening in IT.

Several people were let go.

Around that same time, a full-page newspaper article had been published about my family and the work I was doing at PayPal.

I wasn't completely fired.

Instead, I was taken off salary, reduced to hourly pay, and transferred into Technical Support.

At first, that could easily have looked like a major step backward.

But I've learned that sometimes the things that look like setbacks are actually doors opening in another direction.

For the next couple of years, I managed to get the weekend shift.

I worked three 12-hour days.

That gave me the rest of the week off.

And that changed everything.

For years, I had been building systems, fixing problems, working with computers, troubleshooting technology, and finding ways to make things work better.

Now I had something I hadn't really had before.

Time.

I suddenly had several days every week available to do something of my own.

So I started repairing computers.

At first, it wasn't some grand business plan.

I knew how to fix computers.

People needed help.

I had time during the week.

And my family still needed me to keep moving forward.

So I started helping people.

One computer became another.

One customer told another.

And little by little, something began to grow.

In 2003, Affordable Computer Repair was born.

I didn't know then what it would eventually become.

I didn't know how many computers I would repair, how many people I would meet, or how many times that little business would be tested over the years.

All I knew was that once again, I had been given an opportunity.

And I intended to make the most of it.

**To be continued in Part 9 – The Beginning of Affordable Computer Repair**

09/02/2026

ANOTHER COMPUTER. ANOTHER WIN. 💻🛡️

This one started with a simple problem: the customer could no longer log into his own computer.

But once we started digging, it became clear this was much more than a Windows password issue.

We preserved the original drive before making changes and found evidence that multiple remote-access programs had been installed and executed on the system, including ScreenConnect, UltraViewer and Alpemix. Microsoft Defender had also recorded Severe Trojan detections.

The photos with this post show some of what we actually found—including the startup password that had been placed on the computer and the remote-access software left behind.

At that point, I wasn't comfortable simply “cleaning it up” and handing it back.

We:

✅ Cloned and preserved the original hard drive
✅ Reviewed the security logs and system evidence
✅ Documented the remote-access activity
✅ Completely wiped the compromised Windows installation
✅ Installed a clean copy of Windows
✅ Updated Windows and drivers
✅ Restored the customer's personal data
✅ Set up a full monthly backup
✅ Set up a partial backup every Friday

The goal wasn't just to make the computer turn on again.

The goal was to make sure the customer could trust it again.

This is also a good reminder: if a pop-up suddenly claims to be Microsoft, tells you your computer is infected, and gives you a phone number to call—don't call it and don't give anyone remote access to your computer.

If something doesn't look right, shut it down and call someone you trust.

Affordable Computer Repair
509 W Mission Ave.
Bellevue, NE 68005
📞 402-953-0001

Veteran Owned • Local • Repair First

Real problems. Real diagnosis. Real solutions.

09/02/2026

⚠️ LOST FILES? WHAT YOU DO NEXT CAN MAKE THE DIFFERENCE.

A customer realizes pictures, documents, QuickBooks files, or other important data is missing.

The natural reaction is to keep clicking around, restart the computer, run recovery software, or try a few things from Google.

Sometimes that is exactly what makes the recovery harder.

When a file is deleted, the data may still physically exist on the drive for a period of time. But every time Windows writes new information to that drive, some of that recoverable space can be overwritten.

With an SSD, the situation can be even more time-sensitive because of features such as TRIM, which can permanently clear deleted data.

If the missing information is important:

Stop using the computer or drive.
Don't install recovery software onto the same drive.
Don't repeatedly restart it hoping the files come back.
If the drive is clicking, disappearing, extremely slow, or causing the computer to freeze, shut it down.

One of the biggest mistakes we see is someone spending hours trying different recovery programs before bringing the drive in.

By that point, the recovery isn't necessarily impossible—but we may have fewer options than we would have had at the beginning.

At Affordable Computer Repair, we approach data recovery differently depending on what happened.

Accidentally deleted files are different from a failing hard drive.

A corrupted Windows installation is different from a drive that no longer spins up.

And a computer involved in a security incident may require preserving the original drive before anything is changed.

The first step is figuring out what happened before doing something that could make it worse.

If important files suddenly disappear, don't panic and don't keep experimenting.

Turn it off and give us a call.

Affordable Computer Repair
509 W Mission Ave.
Bellevue, NE 68005
📞 402-953-0001
Veteran Owned • Local • Repair First

08/31/2026

A BIOS update made this gaming computer look like it had a bad graphics card — but the GPU wasn’t the problem.

The customer’s computer lost video after a BIOS update, and the motherboard was stopping on the VGA light. At first glance, that could easily point toward a failed graphics card.

Instead of replacing parts based on a guess, we tested the system and found the RTX 3070 Ti itself was working properly.

The real problem was the way the graphics card was connected through the PCIe riser / PCIe configuration after the BIOS update.

We removed the GPU from the riser, installed it directly into the motherboard, and the system booted normally again.

Afterward, the graphics card passed extended FurMark stress testing with no crashes, artifacts, or video loss.

That’s why proper diagnostics matter. Sometimes the part that looks guilty isn’t actually the problem.

Affordable Computer Repair
509 W. Mission Ave
Bellevue, NE 68005
402-953-0001

Best of Bellevue 2025 Winner

08/29/2026

Part 7 — When I Ran From God

In 1986, I left the Pentagon and headed to Fort Meade, Maryland.

My new assignment was with the National Reconnaissance Office, and just like my assignment at the Pentagon, I really had no training for the job. They basically handed me a stack of books and said, “Here you go.”

So I learned.

That same year, something much more important happened in my life.

In January of 1986, I made a profession of faith and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior.

At the time, I had no idea what the Lord had planned for me. Looking back now, I can see that He was working in my life even when I had no idea where I was going.

One thing I immediately liked better about Fort Meade was the work schedule.

At the Pentagon, for about three years, we worked two day shifts, two swing shifts, two midnight shifts, and then two days off.

Then we started all over again.

That schedule really messed me up when it came to sleeping. Half the time, my body didn't know whether it was supposed to be awake or asleep.

At Fort Meade, we worked 12-hour shifts and stayed on the same shift for about a month at a time.

Compared to the Pentagon, that seemed wonderful.

Of course, I wasn't exactly taking it easy.

While working at NSA, I was actually working three jobs. I had two jobs inside NSA, and in the evenings I loaded trucks for UPS.

I had already been married for about a year. My wife, Sherrie, was born and raised in Annapolis, Maryland, and my stepfather had retired from NSA.

I was married, working constantly, trying to build a life, and I still had no idea where that life was going.

Then our family started growing.

In 1987, our first child, Stephanie, was born.

In 1989, our first son, Steven Jr., was born.

With the help of my VA loan, I was also able to buy our first house in Maryland for about $64,000.

That was amazing at the time because houses around us were selling for well over $100,000. Being able to buy that house was something I never thought would happen.

By 1990, though, I had another major decision to make.

Was I going to stay in the military, or was I eventually going to get out?

The NRO wanted me to stay, but I told them one of my biggest problems was simple:

I couldn't afford to live in the Washington, D.C. area.

I was given two choices for my next assignment.

Buckley or Omaha.

I chose Omaha.

So in February of 1990, Sherrie and I loaded our lives and our two children into a 26-foot U-Haul and headed for Nebraska.

We arrived at Offutt Air Force Base and unloaded that truck into base housing the very same day.

I remember people telling me that coming to Omaha was a mistake.

I didn't believe that.

I believed it was God at work.

About three months later, we bought a house in South Omaha. That became the second home we purchased using my VA loan.

And when it came to finding a church, we didn't have to look very long.

The very first Sunday we walked into Midlands Bible Baptist Church in Bellevue, the pastor wasn't even there. An evangelist named Tucker was preaching that Sunday.

But Sherrie and I knew almost immediately.

This was where we belonged.

We joined the church.

Nebraska was becoming home.

Then in May of 1991, Michelle was born.

She was going to be breech, but the doctors were able to turn her before inducing labor.

By then, we had three children, a home, a church family, and what looked from the outside like a pretty clear direction.

Then came June of 1992.

After nine years in the Air Force, I got out.

And suddenly I discovered something I hadn't really expected.

I was almost completely unmarketable.

I had spent years doing highly specialized work. I had worked at the Pentagon, NSA, and with the NRO. I held a Top Secret/SCI clearance.

But once I stepped outside that world, most of what I had done didn't translate very well into an ordinary civilian résumé.

The most valuable thing I had professionally was my security clearance, and that was really only valuable if I went back into the same kind of work I had just left.

And I didn't want to do that anymore.

Before I got out of the military, I had already started looking for another direction.

I became involved in the financial industry. I earned my insurance license, my Series 6 and Series 63 securities licenses so I could sell mutual funds, and I also did some mortgage work.

The dream sounded great.

Work on commission.

Build your own business.

Recruit people.

Build a team.

Work hard now so that someday you could have something of your own.

At the same time, I did whatever I needed to do to make a living.

One of my first jobs after leaving the military was delivering flowers for Baker's. I did that for about a year.

Then I spent about a year working at UNMC as a data technician.

But I kept working at the financial business.

By 1995, I was doing it full time.

Recruiting by day and selling by night.

And for a while, that was all fine and dandy.

I believed I was building something.

I believed eventually it was all going to pay off.

Then one day my oldest daughter, Stephanie, who was probably about eight years old at the time, said something to me that I have never forgotten.

She came up to me and said:

“Hey Dad, I found a dollar. Can we buy bread?”

That hit me hard.

Here I was chasing this dream of building my own financial business, telling myself that someday all the work was going to pay off.

And my little girl had found a dollar and was excited because maybe we could use it to buy bread.

That was the moment I realized:

I had to stop dreaming and get a real job.

My family couldn't live on what I hoped might happen someday.

They needed me to provide for them now.

So I quit the financial business.

And after working at the Pentagon, NSA, and the National Reconnaissance Office, after having a Top Secret/SCI clearance and working around some of the most sophisticated technology in the world, do you know what my next job was?

I became a garbage man.

That's right.

I went to work for Watts Trucking, the garbage company.

And I wasn't ashamed of it.

I had a wife and children who needed me, and there was honest work available.

So I went to work.

I stayed with Watts for about three months.

Then I went to work for Deffenbaugh Industries, where I would spend about the next five years.

I started out driving a garbage truck.

After about four months, they made me a supervisor.

And then something happened that seemed to happen everywhere I worked.

I found my way back to computers.

I hadn't started Affordable Computer Repair yet, but throughout the 1990s I was doing computer work on the side.

I fixed computers.

I set up computers for businesses.

I did bookkeeping.

I figured out software.

If there was something involving a computer that nobody else wanted to figure out, somehow it usually ended up in front of me.

At Deffenbaugh, I eventually created an IT operation designed to help the company deal with and fight city fines.

No matter what job I took, I always seemed to find my way back to computers.

Looking back now, maybe God was already preparing me for something I couldn't see yet.

But this was also the period when my life started getting much harder.

I was injured at work.

I came very close to losing my left hand.

At the same time, things in my personal life were becoming more difficult.

I began hearing things that cut deeply.

That I spent too much time at church.

That I wasn't a good businessman.

That I wasn't a good father.

That I wasn't a good Christian.

Maybe some of those things were said out of frustration.

Maybe some of them were things I was already afraid were true.

Either way, after a while, they started getting inside my head.

For years, I had been trying to provide for my family.

Trying to serve God.

Trying to be a husband.

Trying to be a father.

Trying to build a career.

Trying to figure out where I belonged.

And I was also doing a lot at church.

I remember one day approaching our pastor with a long list of all the jobs and responsibilities I was doing at the church.

I told him:

“I can't do all of this anymore.”

I had decided that I was going to give almost everything up and just do one thing.

That probably sounds like a perfectly reasonable decision.

But to me, it didn't feel reasonable.

I felt like a traitor.

I felt like a heel.

I felt like I was letting everybody down.

And the strange thing was, I wasn't happy doing just one thing.

I was happiest when I was doing it all.

Serving at church wasn't simply a list of jobs I had somehow gotten stuck with.

I loved being involved.

I loved helping.

I loved doing whatever needed to be done.

But somewhere along the way, everything had become too much.

Work.

Money.

My injury.

Being a husband.

Being a father.

Trying to build a career.

Trying to serve God.

And then hearing that I wasn't doing any of it well enough.

I was being pulled in every direction.

When I tried to step back from church, I felt terrible.

When I tried to keep doing everything, I felt like I was failing my family.

I couldn't seem to win.

Eventually, I convinced myself there was only one way I could get away from all of it.

I had to leave.

So I sold our house.

And I moved my family out to the country.

At the time, I probably thought I was solving a problem.

I thought that if I could just put some distance between myself and everything that was happening, somehow life would get better.

It didn't.

Looking back over my life, I can say without hesitation:

It was the worst decision I ever made.

And the consequences didn't fall only on me.

That decision had a terrible impact on my family—an impact that, in some ways, could never be repaired.

I had spent years believing God had brought us to Nebraska.

I believed He had led us to our church.

I had watched Him provide for us.

I had watched Him give us a home and a church family.

And when I reached one of the lowest points of my life, instead of holding tighter to all of that...

I walked away from it.

I thought I was running away from the pressure.

I thought I was running away from the expectations.

I thought I was running away from everything that was hurting me.

But the truth is much simpler.

I was running from God.

And I was about to learn that you can change your address.

You can leave your church.

You can move your family out to the country.

You can try to leave everything behind.

But you can't outrun God.

To be continued — Part 8.

08/26/2026

# Part 6 — Learning to Trust God

After I finally understood that salvation wasn't based on a feeling, something else began happening in my life.

I started learning what it meant to actually trust God.

That sounds simple when you say it.

Living it is a little different.

Sherrie and I had started going to church, and one of the things we learned about was tithing.

At the time, money was tight.

Very tight.

We really couldn't afford to give away ten percent of what we were making.

But I remember coming to the conclusion that **we couldn't afford to tithe — and we couldn't afford not to tithe.**

So we decided we were going to be obedient.

I believe our first tithe was around $200.

That was a lot of money to us.

We gave it.

The next day, our dog got hit by a car.

We rushed the dog to the veterinarian.

The bill was about $200.

I remember thinking, *You've got to be kidding me.*

I didn't have another $200.

I had just given $200 as my very first tithe.

I'm still not sure whether that was a trial, a lesson, or simply one of those moments God used to teach me something.

But the story wasn't over.

The next day, I went to the mailbox.

There was a check waiting for me.

It was some kind of refund that I didn't even know I was owed.

**$210.**

I had given approximately $200.

The vet bill was approximately $200.

And then, completely unexpectedly, $210 showed up in the mail.

Some people can call that coincidence.

That's okay.

I knew what it meant to me.

**God was becoming very real.**

Not long after that, another major change was coming.

We were still living in Maryland, and I was working constantly.

At different points I was working as many as three jobs just trying to keep everything going.

Now, I know you're not supposed to make deals with God.

But I remember talking to Him anyway.

I basically told Him:

**If we could move, and I didn't have to work three jobs anymore, I would serve Him.**

I don't recommend bargaining with God.

I was a young Christian.

I was still learning.

But that is honestly what I remember telling Him.

Then our house in Maryland sold.

We had only lived there for about three years.

And somehow, when everything was finished, we made enough from the sale to pay off our debts.

In February of 1990, the Air Force transferred me to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

At the time, it was just Sherrie and me with our two children, Stephanie and Steven Jr.

Michelle wouldn't be born until 1991.

We loaded up our belongings and headed west.

And something immediately happened that I didn't understand was unusual.

We were given base housing almost as soon as we arrived.

I had already been in the Air Force for nearly seven years, but I had never really lived on a normal Air Force base before.

The Pentagon wasn't a normal base.

Fort Meade and the work I had been doing there certainly wasn't a normal Air Force environment.

So I didn't know how base housing normally worked.

I assumed you arrived, they gave you a house, and you moved in.

Apparently, that wasn't how it normally worked.

I mentioned to someone that we had already been given housing.

He looked at me like I was crazy.

There was a waiting list.

A long one.

Then he asked me what religion I was.

I've never been very good at answering that question.

I don't usually describe myself by a denomination.

So I told him:

**"I'm a born-again Christian."**

His response was basically:

**"Well, that explains it."**

A short time later, the housing office called me.

They told me:

**"We made a mistake."**

My immediate response was:

**"It wasn't a mistake."**

Then I asked the important question.

**"Do I have to move?"**

They said no.

And I remember thinking:

**I told you it wasn't a mistake.**

To the housing office, maybe somebody had filled out the wrong paperwork.

Maybe somebody put our name in the wrong place.

Maybe it was simply an administrative error.

But that wasn't how I saw it.

To me, it was one more confirmation.

I had spent almost two years wondering whether what had happened to me spiritually was real because I didn't have the feeling I expected.

Now I wasn't looking for a feeling anymore.

I was watching God work in my life.

We moved to Nebraska.

Our debts were paid.

I didn't need to work three jobs anymore.

I only needed one.

About three months after arriving in Nebraska, we bought our second house.

And I remembered what I had told God back in Maryland.

That if He made a way, I would serve Him.

So I did.

I spent an enormous amount of my free time at church.

I helped wherever I could.

I did a lot.

But the strange thing was, it never felt like a burden.

I enjoyed it.

I wanted to be there.

I wanted to serve.

During that period of my life, I felt closer to God than I ever had before.

It seemed like I could hear Him speaking to me through everything that was happening around me.

Everywhere I looked, I could see His hand.

The unexpected check.

The house selling.

The debts being paid.

The move.

The housing.

The new home.

The ability to support my family without working myself to death.

None of those things by themselves would prove anything to someone else.

But together, at that particular point in my life, they meant everything to me.

**God couldn't have been more real to me than He was during that move and in the years immediately afterward.**

I had spent almost two years waiting for a feeling to prove my faith was real.

Instead, I learned something much more important.

**Faith wasn't about waiting for God to prove Himself to me.**

**It was about learning to trust Him.**

08/26/2026

Pretty cool to see Affordable Computer Repair at the top of this week’s engagement list.

Thank you to everyone in the Bellevue community who follows, comments, shares, asks questions, and supports our little family business. We appreciate you!

Affordable Computer Repair — Bellevue, Nebraska

08/24/2026

AI MAY BE A SMALL BUSINESS OWNER’S BEST FRIEND.

I’m having a field day with it.

There are dozens of little jobs in a business that have to be done, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy doing them. Follow-up, answering the same questions, writing marketing, updating information, organizing things, keeping track of customers — all of it takes time away from actually running the business.

Now I’m finding ways to make AI and automation handle more and more of those jobs for me.

And I love it.

I’m not trying to replace people. I’m trying to stop wasting people’s time doing repetitive work that a computer can handle.

That means more time taking care of customers, fixing computers and growing the business.

That is one of the biggest things I’ve learned:

For a small business, AI isn’t something to be afraid of. Used correctly, it can be one of your best employees.

My son Gideon has been helping us put these systems together through Automate Omaha, along with our website, Google presence, SEO and follow-up systems.

We’ve seen the difference at Affordable Computer Repair, and now he’s helping other local businesses figure out:

What tasks they can automate
Where AI can save them hours
How to improve customer follow-up
How to get found better on Google
How to turn their website into something that actually works for the business

And this line would make a strong headline for the graphic:

SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS: AI MAY BE YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND.

Then underneath:

Automate the work you hate.
Spend more time running your business.

Affordable Computer Repair

09/03/2026

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