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Pasadena · Los Angeles County
Computer, Wi-Fi, and home-office support throughout Pasadena — Old Town, South Lake, the Caltech area, and Hastings Ranch.
Pasadena is where two very different worlds overlap. It is the home of the Tournament of Roses — the Rose Parade winds five and a half miles down Colorado Boulevard every New Year's Day (it moves to January 2 when the 1st falls on a Sunday) and the Rose Bowl Game follows the same afternoon — so the city is built around one of the most-watched events on earth. It is also a serious science town: Caltech sits in the heart of the city and manages NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory just up the arroyo, and that research-and-engineering crowd is a real share of our customers — they skew heavily toward Macs, Linux, dual-boot machines, and secure remote access back into work. And it is a birthplace of the American Craftsman home: the 1908 Gamble House is the Greene brothers' masterpiece, and Bungalow Heaven — Pasadena's first Landmark District, created in 1989 around 800-plus bungalows from the 1900s through the 1920s — is a protected neighborhood of them. Those historic houses are exactly why Wi-Fi is our most common call here: thick plaster-and-lath walls and narrow attics kill signal, and because so many homes are protected you often cannot just drill through original woodwork or run visible cable, so the install has to be discreet. Newer South Lake condos and fiber-eligible Hastings Ranch homes have the opposite problem — the fast line lands at the front of the house and never reaches the back-of-the-house office. There is one more thing about this city, and it has changed the work here more than anything else on this page: the fire started at the top of it. The Eaton Fire was reported the evening of January 7, 2025 in Eaton Canyon, above the north end of town, and by the time it was fully contained on January 31 it had burned just over 14,000 acres, destroyed more than 9,000 structures, and killed 19 people — the second-most destructive wildfire in California history. The worst of it fell on Altadena, the unincorporated community that begins at Pasadena's northern city line and that we cover as part of the same service area, but the city took real losses of its own: in the update its planning department gave the Planning Commission in January 2026, Pasadena counted 117 single-family homes, 12 multi-family units, three ADUs, five commercial buildings, and 59 accessory structures destroyed inside city limits, and 133 red placards posted on buildings unsafe to enter. Then Pasadena absorbed the displacement. The Convention Center became the evacuation shelter, the city issued emergency permits to move eight schools displaced out of Altadena into Pasadena buildings — St. Mark's onto East Howard Street, Odyssey Charter into Art Center College of Design and One Colorado, Aveson into Pacific Oaks College — and three temporary wireless sites went up to patch coverage. Thousands of households landed in Pasadena rentals, condos, and spare bedrooms, and the calls that came with that were ordinary work done under bad circumstances: internet turned on at a temporary address, a borrowed corner of a room made into a real desk, a printer and a few smart-home devices re-paired onto a different network, and a mountain of insurance and permit paperwork that suddenly had to be scanned. The rebuild is slow and still running. Debris removal on the city's burned lots finished over the summer of 2025, and as of that January 2026 update Pasadena had taken in 81 rebuild plan checks and issued 24 building permits, with the first residents to finish breaking ground in June 2025 and back in the house by November. If you are one of them, the studs stage is the only chance you get: conduit and Cat6 run to the office wall, the TV wall, and the camera positions, with the network gear somewhere ventilated and reachable, costs very little while the walls are open and is a real project afterward. Two other things we now say here more than anywhere else we work. Keep a backup somewhere other than the house — the laptop and the external drive in the same desk drawer leave together or not at all. And be careful about anyone who finds you: on December 11, 2025 the Los Angeles County District Attorney charged five unlicensed contractors working the Eaton Fire zone with a felony count of contracting without a license during a declared disaster, separate cases have been filed over fraudulent FEMA relief claims, and the city's own September 2025 rebuild webinar brought in the Contractors State License Board to talk through avoiding scams. The version of that we get called about is digital — a text or an email dressed up as FEMA, an insurer, or an adjuster, asking you to verify your claim on a link. There is one more thing worth knowing about Pasadena, and it is under the street. Because the city owns its own electric utility it also owns the poles and the conduit — roughly 1,570 miles of underground conduit and more than 8,150 utility poles, by the city's own count — and it has been slowly burying the overhead lines since 1968, when the Underground Program began as a plan to restore the scenic views of the San Gabriel Mountains. Everyone with a PWP electric bill is already paying for it through an Underground Surtax that runs from 1.21% to 4.34% of the bill depending on monthly usage. It moves slowly: the utility says it can complete about 0.5 to 0.7 miles of construction a year, at roughly $90,000 per property converted, or $10 to $12 million per mile. The active district is Raymond Avenue — District 06-01, 2.02 miles from Maple Street to the north city limits, a $43.8 million job covering 247 parcels, 268 meters, and 61 poles, with construction starting February 2, 2026, service connections at individual houses starting February 2027, and the poles and lines not coming down until February 2028. If you are on one of those blocks, here is the part that matters to us: the conversion is not just an electrical job. PWP's contractors do the tie-in on private property "for both electric and communications," and the communications crews move their equipment into the new underground structures before the overhead lines come out. So the cable or fiber that has been entering your house from the pole is going to come in somewhere else, on a schedule you do not set, and it may not land where your router sits today. The conversion type shown on the plan is paid for by the project with no out-of-pocket cost; if you want it done differently, you pay for and permit that yourself and still have to meet the project's schedule. The time to decide where the internet equipment should actually live is while the crews are on the street, not after the trench is closed. And outside a full district like Raymond, the city's page on individual service conversions is blunt that poles may remain, because telephone and cable TV equipment stays overhead — undergrounding your power does not necessarily take your internet off the pole. The other half of this is fiber, and it is the question we get asked most often here. Pasadena owns about 171 miles of fiber and sells dark fiber and gigabit connections to businesses, but the city's own fiber page says plainly that "currently the City does not provide service in residential areas." In late 2025 the city asked internet providers, in a request for information with responses due December 15, whether they would partner to run its conduit, fiber, and poles as a retail fiber-to-the-premises network — and in that document the city states that the areas without any fiber-to-the-home provider represent 67% of the city and are "subject to a cable monopoly with no availability of symmetrical, high-speed broadband." So the honest answer is no, you cannot buy the city's fiber for your house today, and a request for information is a long way from a shovel. Plan around the line you can actually get, which for most of Pasadena means cable, an upload speed far smaller than the download, and plaster walls that decide how much of it reaches the back of the house. There is one last thing that shapes the work here, and it shows up in the city's own accounting rather than anywhere on a map. Pasadena's payroll is unusually institutional. The Principal Employers table in the city's Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for the year ended June 30, 2025 lists nine of them: Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 5,029 employees, Kaiser Permanente at 4,508, the Caltech campus itself at 3,925, Huntington Memorial Hospital at 3,878, Pasadena City College at 3,149, the City of Pasadena at 2,380, Pasadena Unified School District at 2,236, ArtCenter College of Design at 851, and Pacific Clinics at 224 — and the report's own percentages add up to just under 24 percent of the jobs in the city. What stands out about that list is what is missing from it: there is no ordinary private company anywhere on it. Every one of the nine is a lab, a university, a hospital system, a college, a school district, a city government, or a nonprofit clinic — the kind of place that hands you a laptop it owns, an email address it controls, a VPN, a password vault, a cloud drive, and a help desk to call when any of it breaks. That is a fine way to live right up until it ends, and in this city it has been ending more often than it used to. JPL is the clearest case: the same city table shows it at 5,771 employees in 2016 against 5,029 in 2025, and the reductions have continued past that. The Lab's own memo to staff in February 2024 put the cut at roughly 530 employees plus about 40 contractors, and in October 2025 JPL's own statement described a realignment affecting approximately 550 colleagues, with staff notified on Tuesday, October 14. But a layoff is only the loudest version of this. A postdoc contract ends. A nurse retires after twenty-five years. A teacher changes districts. A student graduates. Someone takes the package and goes independent. The technology story is the same every time: on a date somebody else picks, the department that ran your computing life stops being yours. The part that catches people is that access usually stops before employment does. JPL's February 2024 memo is unusually blunt about it — the Lab told affected employees to forward their notification to a personal account "immediately, as NASA requires that access to JPL systems be shut off very shortly following the notification," and asked everyone to go into the HR system that same day and check that the personal email address and phone number on file were current. Staff stayed on the payroll through a 60-day notice period, but they were not on Lab for it. So the window in which you can still sign in is not the window in which you are still employed, and it can close the same afternoon. That is why nearly all of this is worth doing early, while it is still housekeeping. The big one — the thing we get called about after the fact more than anything else here — is that a work address quietly became somebody's personal identity. Over fifteen or twenty years the address on the badge ends up on the bank login, the airline account, the insurance portal, the pharmacy, the utility, the kid's school system, and forty subscriptions, and every one of those sends its password reset to a mailbox that is about to stop existing. Nobody notices until they need to reset something and the link lands nowhere. The fix is an evening's work: go through the accounts that actually matter, change each one to a personal address you will keep for the rest of your life, and confirm the change arrives. Do the same for two-factor codes, because if the second factor on a personal account is an app on a work phone, a code sent to a desk line, or a security key in a drawer at the office, that is a locked door waiting to happen. Then the ordinary inventory. Anything genuinely personal on a machine you are giving back comes off it first, and the browser full of saved passwords in particular belongs in something of your own rather than syncing to a profile that is about to be wiped. The licenses go back too — the Office, Adobe, Zoom, and antivirus seats were the institution's, and so was the backup, so a household that has never owned a backup in its life suddenly needs one. If you are going independent, that is the moment the small-business version of all this begins: your own domain and email, your own file storage, your own backup, and a machine that is genuinely yours. Two boundaries on our side, worth saying plainly. The work laptop and the work data belong to the employer and not to you — we will help you take your own things off a machine and hand it back clean, and we will not help anyone carry an employer's files, mail, or accounts out the door. And treat any unexpected message about your severance, your final pay, your benefits, or a job opening as suspect until you have confirmed it through a number or a website you looked up yourself, because a well-publicized round of layoffs is exactly the kind of event that gets used as a hook.
Where we drive in Pasadena.
If you're near these, you're in our area.
We're independent — we'll work with whichever provider you have, and tell you the truth about whether switching is worth it.
We're independent — we'll work with whatever you buy. We service desktop and tower computers and swap out parts — drives, RAM, power supplies, graphics cards. Laptop repairs are more limited, since many parts are soldered in. We don't repair phones or tablets, so the shops below are where we send those — along with the closest places to buy gear.
Shopping online? For most parts and peripherals — drives, RAM, cables, webcams, routers — we recommend Amazon or Newegg. Tell us your setup and we'll send exact links so you don't overpay or buy the wrong thing.
From real Pasadena jobs we've done — what's actually worth buying for the kinds of homes and businesses we see here.
Secure remote-access and dual-boot (macOS + Linux) setup for a JPL/Caltech-area researcher working from home
Discreet mesh Wi-Fi install in a Bungalow Heaven Craftsman home — fixing dead zones without drilling through the original woodwork
POS, receipt-printer, and guest-Wi-Fi check for an Old Pasadena shop ahead of the Rose Parade crowds
New MacBook migration and Time Machine backup setup near South Lake
Internet, desk, printer, and offsite backup setup for an Altadena family renting in Pasadena after the Eaton Fire
Cat6 and conduit plan for a north Pasadena home being rebuilt, while the walls were still open
Planning where the modem, router, and mesh node would live for a north Pasadena home on a street being converted to underground utilities
Moving twenty years of personal logins off a soon-to-close work email address for a laid-off lab employee — recovery addresses, two-factor, and a personal password manager
First home-office setup for a retired Huntington-area nurse: a personal machine, a mailbox of her own, and a backup that is no longer the employer's
Free, plain-English help — whether or not you call us.
Onsite and remote — we come to you.
Often yes — call before noon for best chance of a same-day appointment. Otherwise we schedule next-day.
Yes — older Pasadena homes are some of our most common calls. Plaster-and-lath walls and odd layouts cause Wi-Fi dead zones, and in protected neighborhoods like Bungalow Heaven you often can't drill through original woodwork or run visible cable — so we use mesh, powerline, and discreet routing to fix coverage without touching the house's character.
Yes. Migration to a new Mac, Time Machine restores, and iCloud across devices are everyday calls. We also work with the Caltech/JPL research crowd on Macs, Linux, dual-boot setups, and secure remote access back into work.
Yes — that's a common late-fall call. We make sure your POS, receipt printers, card readers, and guest Wi-Fi can handle the New Year's crowds, and check or add cameras before the busiest days of the year.
Yes, both are within our regular Pasadena-area coverage — and Altadena has been a big part of our work since the Eaton Fire, whether that is a household still renting somewhere else or a house going back up on its old lot.
Yes, and it is some of the most common work we do in this area now. That usually means getting internet running at a temporary address, turning a corner of a rental into a desk that actually works, re-pairing a printer and smart-home devices onto the new network, scanning and organizing insurance and permit paperwork, and setting up a backup that lives offsite this time. If any drives or memory cards came out of the house, bring them — sometimes there is more on them than people expect.
Cat6 to the office wall, the TV wall, and wherever cameras or access points will go, plus empty conduit on at least one run so the next upgrade does not mean opening drywall again. Put the modem, router, and any network switch somewhere ventilated and reachable rather than in a sealed closet. It costs very little at the studs stage and turns into a real project once the walls are closed.
Not today. The city owns about 171 miles of fiber and sells dark fiber and gigabit connections to businesses, but its own fiber page says "currently the City does not provide service in residential areas." In late 2025 Pasadena did ask internet providers whether they would partner to run the city's conduit, fiber, and poles as a retail fiber-to-the-premises network, and in that document the city says the areas with no fiber-to-the-home provider make up 67% of Pasadena. It is worth watching, but a request for information is not a build — so we plan around the connection you can actually get now.
The electric service is the headline, but the communications lines move too: PWP's contractors do the private-property tie-in "for both electric and communications," and the crews shift that equipment into the new underground structures before the poles come out. In practice your cable or fiber ends up entering the house somewhere new, so it is worth deciding before the crews reach your block where the modem, router, and any mesh node should live, and making sure there is a path to that spot. On the Raymond Avenue district the schedule runs construction from February 2026, service connections from February 2027, and pole and line removal from February 2028. One caveat: on smaller individual conversions the city says poles may remain because telephone and cable TV equipment stays overhead, so undergrounding the power does not always take your internet off the pole.
Three things, in this order, and all of them are easier before your last day than after it. First, your email address: if a work address has been sitting on your bank, insurance, pharmacy, airline, or utility logins, change each of those to a personal mailbox you will keep permanently and confirm the change actually arrives — otherwise the password reset goes to an account that no longer exists. Second, two-factor: if the codes for a personal account come from an app on a work phone, a desk line, or a key kept at the office, move them onto something you own. Third, your own files and saved passwords come off the machine before you hand it back, into storage and a password manager of your own. Access is often cut within hours of a notification even when you stay on the payroll for weeks, so treat the day you find out as the deadline, not your last day.
No, and we will say so up front. The work laptop, the work mail, and the work data belong to the employer, not to you. What we do help with is the other side of it: getting your genuinely personal things off a machine before it goes back, wiping your own accounts and saved passwords out of the browser profile, handing the hardware over clean, and then rebuilding what the institution used to provide — a mailbox, storage, licenses, and a backup that are actually yours. If you are going independent, that is the same visit as setting up a domain, business email, and a working backup.
Altadena · San Marino · South Pasadena · Sierra Madre · La Cañada Flintridge
Pasadena is wrapped by the I-210, SR-134, and SR-110. The 210/134 interchange and Colorado Blvd slow at rush hour and around Rose Bowl events; midday access across the city is easy.
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