Anyone been ripped off by computer repair guys ?

Question

I watched a programme on UK TV last night about computer repairman, I were horrified to what length they go to :

PC were built by an expert, all this were filmed, the expert losen the graphics card so it wont display, call this cowboy firm because they had a lot of complaints, he arrived in a shinny new BMW, had a quick look and said the graphics card is gone, most likely the memory too, took the PC away,

Next day he called and said the graphics card had indeed gone, and the memory also, cost to repair ? £350 I think around that mark, next day he returned with the PC and said the cause is teh power supply, so as a goodwill, he replaced it free of charge.

After he left, the expert had a look, and found the cowboy replaced the graphics card and power supply with a cheaper model, plus he stle half the memory thats installed, total cost for these parts in value is around £200.

So a simple push back in job now cost almost £550.

Anyone else had this experience before ??

Answer 1

No not yet.

Answer 2

Happens all the time.

I actually run an ad on Craigslist for computer cleaning (virus/spywhere/even reinstalling windows) or hardware upgrade (RAM, VGA, HDD) installs for $20. Or a complete PC build for $50. I enjoy it, and actually make money in my spare time with it. And half the people who call ask if I can diagnose a problem and fix it. I get plenty of referals also. I'm sure I'm stealing business from BestBuys Geek Squad and CircuitCitys Firedog service, but hey people are cheap.

Answer 3

Like any business there are crooks everywhere. They rely on the lack of knowledge of the public, and the assumption is always that if you have to call them you don't have any idea. I have also known people take a machine to a major store's repair department and suffer similar problems, including not really fixing the fault. This is often due to lack of experience by technicians. All the degrees and certificates mean nothing without actually working on real machines.

Answer 4

I used one of these guys one time and one time only. He redid everythng I had already done (I say I it was my boss who used him) then sent my boss out for so many things he said were neede ,but wait I have some of the things you need, you get the drift. Anyway after about 3 hrs we ended up right back where I had us in the first place, My boss paid the 150.00. The next day I got us where we should be. No I didn't get 150.00 for what I did. Don't forget the extra things we had to have to make things work. about $350 to fix something that was never fixed.

Answer 5

I unquestionably have had some incredibly undesirable reports with computing gadget restoration organizations that ripped me off contained in the previous the worst became Geek Squad. the perfect organisation which will restoration your computing gadget for a fairly extreme priced value might want to could be Comp u . s . a ..

Answer 6

Yes. This happened to my mother once. She'd gotten a virus that her antivirus couldn't completely remove. That's it. Just a virus,the computer was only about 5-6 months old.

The shop she took her computer to really exploited her lack of computer savvy *badly*.
Not only did they keep her computer for two weeks,they took out and replaced her motherboard,cpu and graphics card with inferior ones. They also asked her for her windows setup disks and then turned around and put in a hard drive with another version of windows 95 on it. They said she didn't need her disks any longer and to just do a certain keyboard combination to bypass the login!

She didn't tell me what was happening at first,but once she did, I and my husband went ballistic on the manager. He fired the technician but refused to refund the money mom payed for the junk parts or give us the disks or original parts back,claiming they didn't have them anymore.

I reported the shop to Microsoft for piracy but it turns out that Microsoft was already aware of and in the process of suing the company anyway for the exact same thing,illegally installing their software on customers computers.

I went out and learned everything I could about computers after that,so I could handle family computer problems myself. This was just one bad experience we've had,there were others but this one was the worst.

There needs to be laws to protect consumers getting repairs. They should be forced to prove a part has gone bad and there's a legitimate reason to replace it.

That's why people must always insist that they get the defective parts returned to them BEFORE agreeing to have any work done on a computer. Dishonest repair people will swap good parts for bad ones and turn around and sell them.

And of course...learn everything you can about your computer and what is inside it .Then get EVERYTHING in writing before letting them do any work,this is far too common of a problem and people need to try to protect themselves as best they can.