PC World Refunds and Exchanges

shaun_from_Africa

Fair enough, (I did a bit of speed reading) but a dongle would still have a serial number and if this was checked, the OP might still end up with 2 of them.

somethingcorporate

Do you think they would do this for a £30 dongle? I find it highly unlikely.

shaun_from_Africa

Only £30 I know, but I wonder how many people have tried switching faulty items in the past in the hope of getting a refund and'm sure that this is something that retailers are aware of.

It might be the case that the serial number is incorporated into the barcode on the item box in the same was that it is sometimes done with mobile phones.

Esqui

shaun_from_Africa wrote: »

Fair enough, (I did a bit of speed reading) but a dongle would still have a serial number and if this was checked, the OP might still end up with 2 of them.

I don't even notice or write down what serial numbers of big stuff like TVs we sell are! Really, just say it's faulty and return it.

Tazz360

The gentleman who served me originally was not in store at the time I returned and he did tell me that I could return the item if it didn't solve my problem, I took that as "Try it out mate, if you're unlucky bring it back".

£30 might not sound a lot, but I have to work 5 hours for that!!

Anyway, I sent my partner into the store with the adapter a couple of days ago, she popped the cleavage out a little and told another member of staff (in her ditziest voice) that she had bought it for her new laptop and was told that she didn't need it, as her laptop already had an internal network adapter.
The guy just looked at the box and promptly refunded the debit card.

I felt a little bad for the unsuspecting bloke, but if PC World weren't such a circus, I probably wouldn't have sent in the girlfriend.

Anyway, all sorted now, took the laptop down to the local PC repair bloke and he fixed the problem within a day and charged me £25

Thanks for the replies.

Esqui

Her feminine charms won't work on me

Although, I'd have returned it the first time,

DCFC79

So what was the problem then OP,

Laura_84_2

i would be wary of the tech guys in store too, at least the one near me!.. i cant speak for other peoples experience but my good friend had a desk top pc that crashed one day. Not knowing anything about pcs took it into the tech guys who told her it was unrecoverable and that they would charge 130 to get the data off it for her!. They then took her to the laptop section and proceeded to sell her £650 Laptop with all the gumph on top taking it to £800. She found out a few days later than my fiancee is an IT expert and i told her to bring him the desktop pc.... within 20mins he had fixed it by putting in a windows xp cd! Thus the laptop was returned, stern words were exchanged and the laptop returned fully refunded... it was opened and set up ...but me fiancee put it back to factory defaults. Cant see why they wouldnt take the dongle back?

CoolHotCold

The £130 would be, £100 for data recovery and £30 for a system restore. (Or £100 for data recovery and £30 for a USB stick of some size).

The reason for the cost of the recovery is, there was a updated law within the last year or so, I think its Uk Data Protection Act or something close, where storing data on unsecured systems carries a hefty fine, so all data recoveries are sent down to either Knoll (A specialist data recovery company) or is done in house down at Newark, and thats why it costs so much for a data recovery (be it a case of virus, or crashing, or hard drive thats been reformatted or bad sectors/blocks). If the system doesn't boot into windows and you want the data its either £100 or £700 (for physically damaged drives such as water submerged, fire, dropped from a great height, broken arms etc).

That said, if she was buying a new system it would of been easy to remove the hard drive and stick it in a caddy (total cost about £30-£45) and use the laptop to access the data.

Who goes and buys a laptop without doing even some rudimentary background work first.

Also, as far as returning the laptop, she's lucky they did take it back as they would be under no obligation to accept it back, as its unsellable now, and PcWorld will take a hit on sending it away to have the hard drive wiped and system restored, and also take a hit on the discount required to sell it again.

Tazz360

CoolHotCold.. I admit that I have been stung by PC World in the past, I didn't have a clue about computers when I first purchased a desktop from there.

I wanted the desktop, printer, digital camera and all the accessories.. it came to £2,350 all in all, it wouldn't even cost £1000 if I had gone there now.

They seem to feed off the people who are not techo-savvy, I went in there last year to buy a £499 laptop and nothing else, the salesman kept bugging me to buy norton security, their extended warranty and some other crap, I told them that I would be installing my own security and malware, spyware programs and if the laptop played up, I would fix it or if it was beyond my repair I would get the local shop to sort it out.. He spoke to me like I didn't know what I was talking about and even got his manager to come and talk to me, it felt like they were wary of me just walking in there with £500 in my hand and wanting to buy the lappy with no warranty, finally they sold it to me and I walked out very grumpy.

If you hadn't noticed already, I hate PC World and will never shop there again, just seems like they employ people who have very basic knowledge of computers and aren't very well up on customer service.