Barbas said:
CrystalShadow said:
I seriously mistrust HP after the disastrous weird problems my mother's laptop developed.
(yet knowing full well how bad the last one was, she bought another HP laptop)
Still, I have a HP printer, it's just their laptops I don't trust
I try to avoid seagate hard drives for similar reasons. (outright failure of hard drives? No thanks). But that seems increasingly diffucult, because the list of companies that makes hard drives gets smaller and smaller.
Then there's paypal. Paypal completely screwed me over after I moved to the point I don't really want anything to do with them anymore.
As I quickly found out though, trying to avoid paypal while buying stuff online is getting increasingly difficult.
So I caved on that as well, begrudgingly.
Isn't it fun when a company that has totally pissed you off has such a stranglehold you pretty much can't avoid them? ~sigh~
HP laptops are near the bottom end of the scale (possibly worst) for reliability and customer service. Acer and ASUS are the current leaders, IIRC. This was just some list I read years ago, but my experiences with those companies seemed to line up pretty accurately with it.
Makes sense to me as well. I have an Acer laptop sitting next to me on my desk. Some cosmetic damage aside (the silver has half worn off in places. Something I remember from repairing laptops. Was very common in acers until they changed their industrial designs to something which wasn't silver) - Basically, windows XP flakiness aside (and performance issues with games especially), it works as well as it did when it was new.
It is from 2006 by the way... So, 9 years old)
Meanwhile, that HP system my mother had, (also from about 2006) stopped working properly after no more than a year... >_<
OT: Currys/PC World currently seem to be trying to fill a gap that doesn't need filling. I can't wrap my head around how they make enough money to break even. Their staff just stand around doing nothing all day until a customer walks in, then several home in at once (or take turns, until you've been asked by about four people whether there's anything they can do for you when you're browsing). I can't think of anything they sell that isn't a fraction of the price online - they've pulled prices out of the air on several occasions that have made me laugh and say, "Nope, I'll just get it on Amazon for half of that." A relative told me of a time their technicians were meant to install the OS on his computer (at the store, which for some reason took several hours, so they had to come back and collect it). I never thought a computer could run like a snail with polio, but according to a more tech-savvy cousin who examined it, the monkeys somehow failed to install several vital files. The only way to un-bumfuck that PC is by reinstalling the OS over again, which they can't do because the only other PC they can back their files up onto is in a similar state (because it's HP).
Oh, and for some reason they sell graphics cards.
Yeah. Funny that. I briefly had a job placement at PC world.
I was there for about 8 weeks, and I worked in the tech support department.
The guys there were fairly competent, but on the whole I wouldn't say it was an especially professional environment.
We also had our hands tied to some extent by company policy.
I was literally not allowed to fix hardware faults, no matter how trivial and easy to fix they might be. I sometimes had to diagnose whether there was a hardware or software fault, but... If it was hardware, I wasn't allowed to fix it.
Working there may actually have been my first ever exposure to Zero Punctuation, ironically.
Meanwhile, through random chance, I also spent 3 months working at a place called Mercom.
Want to know what Mercom is? It's a little company that gets computers shipped to it and then fixes them.
What kind of computers?
Well, if you have a computer under warranty, this is where it goes.
Now, I don't mean manufacturer's warranties, no.
I'm talking extended warrranties.
You know. Those weird people that buy a laptop and then get a 5 year or even 10 year warranty on it?
Yeah. We got those. Most of the things we worked on where between 2 and 6 years old...
One of the contracts the company had was... Yep. You guessed it. Curry's/PC World.
So... I've seen PC World's warranty and tech support service from both sides.
And it is terrifying.
Amateur hour stuff, for sure. (And pay to match, unsurprisingly)
The repairs we did were often ridiculous, and not always particularly well done when it comes to stuff like putting screws back in or whatever, or ensuring all the bits of the case were actually in the right spot internally... >_<
The processes were even worse. The management kept changing operating policy every week, and in the end in spite of obsessing over procedure, when something did go wrong they were woefully unprepared, and their policies were badly thought out to deal with any failure of the system.
Unsurprisingly, they eventually lost a laptop, and got in a lot of trouble.
It was so painful to watch, but you don't feel like you can say anything to the management.
What am I gonna say? "excuse me, your ideas are stupid and you should be thinking about this, and this and that instead of what you're obsessing over?" Yeah... XD
The PC world guys meanwhile handled software stuff, mostly, but while I didn't have to, a big part of the job was also 'selling' tech support stuff. Ugh.
(Installing an OS though... Ever done that? Even if it goes flawlessly, in my experience it takes several hours. And unless you have a setup to do blind installs for large corporations, there's a lot of babysitting computers that are in the process of having something installed.
In a repair 'business' environment, it's the kind of thing you set up and then sit next to it while doing something else, because it sucks up so much time.)
