Faulty Pre-Owned Laptop - Can you help?

davb

prowla wrote: »

That is one of those "after the horse has bolted" things...

Yes, but there is still a chance of damage limitation before things go too far.
There is a lot of talk about reinstalling the OS, but the OP may not realise the implications of this, and that PCW won't bother about any data either, and will go straight for a factory restore.

There is still an option to pull the HDD, put it in a USB caddy, and connect to another PC for recovery. Or even (in total desparation) pay PCW to do it.

Its-A-New-Age-Thing

davb wrote: »

Yes, but there is still a chance of damage limitation before things go too far.
There is a lot of talk about reinstalling the OS, but the OP may not realise the implications of this, and that PCW won't bother about any data either, and will go straight for a factory restore.

There is still an option to pull the HDD, put it in a USB caddy, and connect to another PC for recovery. Or even (in total desparation) pay PCW to do it.

forgetting the very very very BASIC mate,

theres every chance itll boot up in SAFE MODE...so why pull the hdd caddy?

then in safe mode system file checker fired through the CMD prompt may very well help aswell..

davb

Just making the point that the data can still be recovered

Its-A-New-Age-Thing

davb wrote: »

It's got a lot more chance of data recovery than some suggestions

safe mode/ copy important files/ try sfc-if that fails re-install it

INCIDENTLY

the need for data recovery was never 'specified' by the poster

CoolHotCold

Actually, PcWorld won't restore the system. They will explain that you either do it yourself and tell you how (or print off the instructions) OR if you don't want to do that, they will charge £29.99 to Restore it, if it fails/doesn't even restore its hardware fault (or at the very least a corrupted recovery partition) and will refund the money and will arrange for a repair.

Like I've said and IANAT said, Software isn't covered by the warranty, I've used a toaster as a example but I've got a few more to throw out.
You wouldn't phone your dealer and demand a refund for a car you just purchased or a free repair because you put diesel in a petrol tank.


Also until the OP responds or explains what he means, the best I can determine is it isn't going past POST, it sticks at the splash screen so no Safe Mode will fix it, would save a lot of problems with future posts if people read the original post.

culpepper

If you have a cd drive in it,try booting a live CD/DVD of puppy linux(downloadable full OS) . If that boots,it is most likely the harddrive that is at fault and it would allow you to retrieve any files you want to keep by putting them on a CD/pen drive or external drive before PC world get the machine back to mend or whatever.