Aria.co.uk Poor Experience

Mista_C

Sorry for a fairly lengthy post.

A little background...

A friend and I had been talking about what we were getting our respective children for Christmas. She's a low earning single Mum and said she would've liked to get her young lad his own computer (mostly for education purposes) but at the moment there was no way she could afford a reasonable spec PC on her budget.

I suggested she looked at Aria's refurbished PCs and if there was anything reasonable I would order it through my business and she could pay it back once Christmas was over and she wasn't under such a budget restraint. She agreed and we found a reasonable refurbished Core2Duo based machine with 2GB RAM for under £100.
The order was placed on December 9th and the machine arrived a few days later.

...onto the problems...

As with any pre-assembled PC I buy the first thing I did was lift the lid (no screws, just quick release catches) to make sure there were no runaway screws ready to short as soon as the machine had power.
I was greeted with a layer of dust coating the interior and so much clumped dust in the CPU HSF (Heat sink & fan) that I thought the previous owner may have been Don King's barber.
Unfortunately my initial reaction was to remove it and fool that I am didn't think to take photos until I'd already removed the large majority of debris. However, I did take a couple before I completely cleaned the thing.


Initially the fan could not be seen due to the "fluffier" dust which I'd already removed by the time I thought about a photo.

While having the case open I also noticed the RAM consisted of 1GB in the form of two 512MB sticks, only half of the advertised amount.

I called Aria Customer Services and spoke to a helpful gentleman who said he could either send out the remaining RAM or suggested I submit an RMA request considering the dust. I asked him how long it would take to get a replacement and he replied that an RMA number would be issued within 24-48 hours and a replacement would normally be with me within a week but, due to the time of year, he couldn't guarantee it. I said I understood but as it was only the 12th I had roughly a week and a half to get everything sorted. I put down the phone, submitted an RMA and waited 48 hours.

After 48 hours I had still received no RMA number so I phoned CS back and spoke with another man. I asked if he could tell me how long I would have to wait for my RMA number. He said I would need to speak to Sales and he would have someone call me back before the end of the day (Friday 14th). Friday passed without a call. Saturday morning I posted the same query to the Aria Facebook page. I also sent an email to the company owner expressing my disappointment so far.
On the Monday I received a reply on Facebook asking me to email a particular staff member at Aria. I did so and he replied asking me for the frequency of the RAM, which I then sent to him in a return email. I have heard nothing since.

I could no longer wait so yesterday afternoon I went out and bought some RAM elsewhere. I spent last night refurbishing the PC and installing the additional RAM. I then attempted to install MS Office using a disc provided by my friend. The installation started and ran for a few minutes before ejecting the tray while simultaneously displaying a message asking me to insert a disc. Expecting the problem to lie with the disc I then tried my own copy, the drive could not recognise it. I ran a lens cleaner and then went on to try several other discs of my own, none of which would be recognised by the DVD drive.

So now, I have a refurbished PC which had not been refurbished, arriving with only half the amount of RAM advertised and after 5 minutes use the DVD drive appears to have developed read problems which, so far, appear to be laser related and Aria don't seem interested in the slightest.

I have been an Aria customer for around a decade without any problem, until now. After this debacle I will no longer be using them for business or private orders nor will I be recommending them to my family, friends and customers in the future.

Mista_C

In the interest of fairness I should add that a couple of minutes after posting this the postman arrived with a small package containing the additional 1GB RAM from Aria. Unfortunately, as mentioned in my OP, I've already bought replacement RAM although using the one stick of 1GB Aria have sent would have disabled the Dual Channel support.