Laptop Repair

x1x1

Hi,

I have a faulty laptop, the fault is that it freezes periodically, the screen stays static, mouse wont move etc, after a while it resumes. Womens animal and converse shoes

I asked a local computer repair company to repair the fault with my laptop on October 2011. The man came around to my home and I tried to show him the fault but could not. He did listen to the bottom of the laptop, and said that the hard drive sounded faulty. He suggested he replace my harddrive with a new one, which was bigger, 500GB. He did that and re-installed windows for me as I had a backup of my data. He did offer to do a straight transfer but I thought a fresh installation would be best.

He charged me £100 and returned the laptop later the next day.

The problem I had still existed so I got back in touch. He asked me to do various things via email including replace drivers etc, but this didnt repair the fault. He suggested the chipset might have a fault as he could find similar fault descriptions for a dell laptop with the same chipset. At this point he suggested I contact Acer to replace the motherboard under the sale of goods act.

I tried calling at various points up till now with no answer. I emailed with a complaint to which he has responded that he has helped me all he can and that he resolved the initial problem. He has offered a £45 refund which is for the labour. I have said I want £100 back and he can have his hard drive back.

Where do I stand on this? can I insist he put it back how it was?

thanks

_DanielJ

I'm not sure if I can help with the consumer side, but in terms of the issue, you might have faulty RAM. Try running memtest86 to see if it finds any errors.

As for the labour - replacing an HDD takes less than 5 minutes and involves no technical ability. Typically 4 screws on the case, 4 screws on the hdd, swap over the drive and screw it back up.

Zandoni

_DanielJ wrote: »

As for the labour - replacing an HDD takes less than 5 minutes and involves no technical ability. Typically 4 screws on the case, 4 screws on the hdd, swap over the drive and screw it back up.

Trueish, but it takes a whole lot longer installing Windows with the correct drivers etc.

Fosterdog

What worries me more is that all he did was listen to the bottom of the laptop, there are plenty of diagnostic tools around that would prove whether it was the hard drive, I'd never rely on the noise it makes alone.

System

_DanielJ wrote: »

As for the labour - replacing an HDD takes less than 5 minutes and involves no technical ability.

You haven't replaced a HDD in a Dell XPS then? You have to remove the palm rest and touchpad to get to the drive.

fishybusiness

A difficult one to sort out.....I used to be a computer tech and if I had one of my customer come back to me with this problem I would feel compelled to take it back in and do some more checks.

You say he listened to it and then decided the hard drive was on its way out, fair enough. How do you know he didn't run a check on it later and the check confirmed the drive was faulty? Any tech worth their salt would do that before committing to a repair, and it is easy to do.

I think it is worth entering dialogue with the tech to find out exactly what he did do before pushing him in to a corner.

If he/ you still has the old drive he can demonstrate to you that it is faulty, if indeed he did check it.

As already mentioned, a memory check with Memtest or similar is a worthy test, it often shows faults up very quickly but I would leave it a few hours to run.

The next step is to reinstall Windows from scratch, did he do that? or just clone your old drive over to the new one?

From there if it still freezes, look in the Windows log files, they can be a good source of information on what is failing.

Your repair tech should be able to follow this route, and should be willing to put the time in to look at it, before you and he fall out and end up getting angry.

Bottom line, it needs a full technical appraisal before you start asking for money back. If he won't do it, write to him and say that you will take it somewhere else for a full check and if other faults are found, he will be liable for the bill.

If that doesn't work, you have a problem, is it worth using the law for £100? In principle yes, in practice, maybe not.

visidigi

To be fair, £100 for what did he was actually quite reasonable, and like you say, the capacity of the drive was greater than our previous one.

Bear in mind, you called him out for a fault you couldn't demonstrate, therefore any work he did was purely guess work which you accepted. He has since done further research on the issue and provided you with further advice at no cost to you.

I would personally say he's been quite reasonable, I am in fact quite surprised he offered you the £45 back - as this would take him to the retail cost of the drive itself.

Cake and eat it comes to mind by asking for £100 back.