Computer repairs

[Wookie]

"What used to be"? Has it changed?
I bought my first Pentium off them a few years ago. I think they were in other premises then - I remember a staircase in the middle of the shop. No problems with it whatsoever; in fact I think I'm still using the case and keyboard.
Horror stories of overworked staff and violence means I won't ever set foot in there again, though.
In fact, I'd sooner go to PC World.

 

[age'd parent]

I went in there once for some heat sink compound, I was told they're not allowed to sell it as it was poisonous! idiots, or thought they could con me because I look old.

 

[shoes]

Crikey I have never heard that before!

 

[wmrcomputers]

Such drabble!!

I can't believe they ripped my customer off for £20. They were elderly, nothing was repaired, and they were only in the shop for 4 minutes!! The name should have been JC CON-PUTERS

Oh, and no offence to you Tek Monkey.... we all have to work somewhere

 

[Toble]

A friend recently took his laptop (that he'd bought from me) to PCW because it was resetting halfway through booting.
They said the HD had failed and needed replacing. 1 week later he got the laptop back, with all his old files intact, and a bill for £150, which included the cost of the new HD.
So where was the old HD? "Oh, we threw it away"
In reality, it was still in the machine, and all they'd done was repair the windows installation.
I know it was there, as I opened the machine up and saw the drive with my initials scrawled on it, and the date i'd set the machine up.

You may think you've heard this tale from me before, quoting a different price and saying that it was my sister last time. This is a different event. The feckers have pulled the same stunt twice on people I know.

Henceforth, if I hear of anyone I know going to PCW, i'll be adding them to the incoming ban list on my phone.

 

[wmrcomputers]

A friend recently took his laptop (that he'd bought from me) to PCW because it was resetting halfway through booting.
They said the HD had failed and needed replacing. 1 week later he got the laptop back, with all his old files intact, and a bill for £150, which included the cost of the new HD.
So where was the old HD? "Oh, we threw it away"
In reality, it was still in the machine, and all they'd done was repair the windows installation.
I know it was there, as I opened the machine up and saw the drive with my initials scrawled on it, and the date i'd set the machine up.

You may think you've heard this tale from me before, quoting a different price and saying that it was my sister last time. This is a different event. The feckers have pulled the same stunt twice on people I know.

Henceforth, if I hear of anyone I know going to PCW, i'll be adding them to the incoming ban list on my phone.

I'd personally be threatening them with press exposure about this. If you can prove the hard drive was fitted by you and that they've replaced nothing, you could get a nice payout to keep quiet!! In fact, bugger the payout.... expose them! I would!!

 

[gdavies]

All this bad talk about so called pc shops mis treating customers just makes me want to open up a pc repair centre in stafford and do thing right. A passion for a subject is a love for it and in any means you DO NOT try to con nor do you try to abuse the plce your in just because you cant be arsed to do your job

But I also agree with WMR expose them no one else will ever learn if they don't get exposed that is sheer shameful and riles me up not fair on the end user

 

[tek-monkey]

I did indeed work for JC computers, spent 2 years there. Despite the bad rep it seems to have, I feel I have to defend the place. Virtually every PC I touched was fixed, if I felt it wasn't viable I told the customer. The problem is Jon does it as a business, its completely unrealistic to spend 3 hours plus on a single machine when there are other machines to be fixed that actually provide an income. Also, and I suspect most people will have experienced this, sometimes a machine has 2 or even 3 problems that make diagnostics difficult - and there is no way in hell you'd buy a motherboard for a laptop on the offchance.

Even when I worked there we had people swearing that PCs hadn't been fixed properly, even accusing us of installing spyware deliberately after a reload to ensure they'd come back and give us more money (Oh what delight I had showing that blokes wife all the teen porn and dogging sites her husband had browsed in the 3 days he'd had the PC back).

I don't know how they're doing now, but we probably fixed 15 PCs a day between us. Very very few came back.

 

[wmrcomputers]

Of course I'm not saying it's all bad Tek, and I agree that sometimes multiple faults can cause a difficult diagnosis. I also agree that it's not viable for a business to spend too long on a single job. IMO though in the case of the laptop fault mentioned above, I think they should have simply told the customer that as they don't have access to the error codes, it's something they need to ask a Toshiba centre to diagnose - and then ideally refer them to the nearest one as a "good will gesture".

Also, in the case of my customer who was charged £20 for a no-fix when the graphics was physically loose and barely slotted into the AGP slot... I can't understand how they couldn't spot this. You felt it as soon as you connected a monitor to the socket.

No doubt that it was probably a case of certain individuals that have given rise to a bad name for the company.... I'm sure that you were one of their more honest staff Tek

 

[tek-monkey]

Yeah, can't really excuse the gfx card. Saying that, I have had cases that were so crap the cards wouldn't fit that well, but even if that was the case it should have been noted that the case was the issue. Also very suprised they didn't find the Tosh codes, very suprised a quick trawl on the net didn't show anything.

 

[shoes]

I think you have to also look at the circumstances here.

If you're taking your computer to a computer repair shop it's because you're a typical user i.e. you want the PC to do a handful of things which you will do again and again and you want it to just work. The chances are you're not like tek/mycult/wmr/gdavies/db/wookie/toble etc. and as such even the smalled of error messages cannot be investigated, so you take it to a professional. Much in the same way you wouldn't try to replace brakepads on your car if you didn't know what you were doing, you find a mechanic.

Then the PC shop fixes the error and gives you a working machine but probably won't have established the cause due to it being a minor error made by the user. This minor error is no longer an issue however because no one has told the user what they did to cause it, three days later it happens again and the PC appears to have not been repaired.

Of course there will always be 'horror' stories but on the whole I can imagine user error accounts for a lot of return business. Personally I can vouch for tek's abilities and standard of workmanship, so I believe he wouldn't have sent PCs out of work which had been bodged.

 

[gdavies]

that is very true i am currently working on an mri boot disc which should when all done provide error logs before i fix a pc and then again after to show what has been fixed along with many other things kind of shocks me that this sort of thing has not been around before. If JC have that many computers to fix in a day i am sure it must get tedious to say the least but just to state what has been done and what has caused it would help prevent it

 

[tek-monkey]

I made my own XP CDs, with pretty much every driver installed. That helped a lot.

 

[MyCult]

Right as M$ don't sell that any more. What does this mean in terms of copyright for all our old XP install disks?

 

[gdavies]

i did the windows install discs on 2 dvds so i had an orginal of all of them on 2 dvds all i needed was the code from the customer to make it legal for them. Also did the xp stripped down to run faster and put on all sorts of drivers and it took up a dual layer dvd but then you need a dvd rom to read. This time I am trying to create a dvd that will boot up and scan the system clearing viral spam and other nasties as well as allow me to reset passwords and typical human error problems but it is taking time to do have spent a long time on it so far