House Insurance + Cola + Laptop

Swans1912

Hi All,

I have house insurance with which covers my contents too, unlimited but just taken out a new policy with directline that is due to start soon.

I've managed to knock a bottle of coke zero over my partners laptop, her pride and joy (she doesn't know yet :eek: ). All i know about it is its an Apple iBook and she paid around £1000 for it 2-3 years ago.

Its got £200 worth of itunes music which i have a feeling has lost and wont be insured but I wanted to claim on our house insurance for the laptop.

I have some areas that i'm unsure on and would like to clear up before i call them. (If its gud news i may not be sleeping on to sofa 2nite!)

When i makes a claim, what info will they ask on the laptop or what will happen? Will they need a receipt? Will i have to send it off for them to try to repair it?? What will i get in return?

I've double checked with directline and they say that only if you have made more than two claims do they need to be informed so i have no worries about that.

Thats for looking, and wish me luck for telling the partner

tinkerbell84

You'll only be covered if you have accidental damage cover on the insurance. And depending on the value (an ibook would not be worth much now) it might have to be a named item.

Hope everything else is backed up, because if the coke has gotten into the harddrive, all the tunes and anything else on there is gone forever.

I'm_With_Stupid

I'm not an expert on computers, but I'm pretty sure that hard drives are pretty well sealed, so it might've survived. Might be worth getting someone who knows what they're doing to attach it to another Mac and try and salvage the data.

Also, do Apple not keep a record of the music you've downloaded and let you download it as and when you choose? I think Napster do that. If not, I think this is a situation where wink-wink, nudge-nudge, could be morally justified.

Swans1912

We do have accidental cover thankfully and anything worth over £2000 needs to be named, so not required there.

I've had a look on Apple's web-site and they no longer sell the ibook, at-least in the UK anyway. I'm not 100% sure how it works with the replacement, will they replace it with a similar laptop (an Apple?) or just hand over some cash towards a new one?

I'm calling them tomorrow but it would be nice to be armed with some information so they can't take the pee!

tinkerbell84

ibooks were replaced by mac books so they might replace with one of a similar spec.

my IT consultant OH has seen plenty of harddrives damaged by coke. good idea to hook it up and see if you can get the files off it.

has it been backed up?

itunes only allows one time downloads AFAIK

Swans1912

Thinking about the music the songs are also on my laptop so hopefully we can transfer the over again.

Can I expect them to take the laptop away? I would like to keep the hard-drive to see if we can rescue some word documents.

FlameCloud

They should take it away and inspect it. The laptop in its entirety would become their property and you'd need to pay for the hard disk if you wanted it back.

tinkerbell84

And in future, never EVER drink coke anywhere near a computer!

dave_behave

For future reference, you may be interested that Nationwide cover your purchased music too.

Here's a link to their cover.

http://www.nationwide.co.uk/insurance/home_insurance/introduction.htm?source=nationwide&campaign=homepage&execution=homeinsurance_layout2_adaptive_slot2_info_21072008

It's one of those things that you don't really think about, but some people do have pretty large investments in digital music!

beepboes

tinkerbell84 wrote: »

And in future, never EVER drink coke anywhere near a computer!

Condescending, much?

tinkerbell84