Safe Speed Forums

I bought a friend a new laptop three weeks ago, a new Packard Bell EasyNoteTJ65 with Windows 7 installed and to cut a long story short it keeps on powering off in an instant
and blue screening while moaning about some kind of installed software issue.
Anyway in view of it being a little over three weeks old I wasn't interested in trying to find the cure so took it back to Currys for an exchange.
Now apparently my friend hadn't created a recovery disc and according to them this is viewed as negligence and therefore voids the warranty and if it was due to a software installation then this is not covered by the warranty either.
Now my point with the software is, he never installed any so it must be the pre-installed stuff. Now since the laptop never worked properly from the off, for whatever reason then surely it wasn't fit for purpose when they sold it which is contrary to the Sales of Goods Act.
But I tried to return it today and they were insistent on the recovery disc issue, in fact to say they were unhelpful is an understatement, which came as no surprise.
Anyway I have restored to factory settings and made a disc and all seems to be well again but I knew nothing of a recovery disc clause and I'm 'OK' with computers but he is clueless even though it has a pop up windows during set up telling you to make a recovery disc.
It has just started raining again here in Cumbria - Excellent!

Now , I'd have thought that in yer neck of the woods a safety disc =

Sorry if it offends
( I know ,but I come from part of the world where water rules our existance ,but we have to get off our asses ,and sometimes the only way is through HUMOUR ) .

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Offended? Nah!
I just see it as a bit of a hindrance every couple of years.
But this year I have managed to blag a few days off work as a result so there is always a silver lining.
I do have a relation though whose house is flooded to a height of around shoulder level and she is seriously dischuffed.

Careful on that road - now the lake is over it, the limit is TEN miles per hour, not TWENTY!

The LDNPA is doing it's own enforcement, and can go to court with no evidence other than the wardens opinion!

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

The "recovery disc" trick is a load of balls.....especially since the thing rarely works if you need it.
The whole "warranty" thing and the "sale of goods act" thing is abused and ignored rampantly by practically every retailer in the country.
Your "rights" should be protected by the sale of goods act...the goods should be "of merchantable quality" and "fit for purpose" and "durable"
The "warranty" is usually an add-on insurance sold you by the RETAILER, and is...basically....a waste of money....to you that is...to the RETAILER it is a win-win situation...since many just say that "abuse" or "misuse" led to the problem and that is not covered by the "warranty"
You also do not need "their" warranty...since if you buy it with a credit card you are protected by that purchase...if the price is over £100.00...and you can also buy an insurance policy to cover you anyway...often at a much lower price...IF you are not protected by your HOUSEHOLD insurance, which many are..
Recovery disc. Many laptops now come with the "recovery disc" being in a separate partition of the hard drive.
My laptop has linux installed (ubuntu9.04)...much less hassle than windows...and this desktop has dual operating systems....I use linux to access my online bank...after the last invasion of the malware I decided to not use windows for anything critical or needing security...

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

No recovery disk ... not heard that one before ... thats a new one ... and a load of cobblers. T'would be like a car dealer selling a ready for the road car with no engine oil, then saying the engine is wrecked because the buyer neglected to put any in before use therefore the warranty is void. As far as I'm aware most computers come ready to go with no requirement for user intervention. Some used to try it on if you added more memory or another hard drive yourself ... you opened the case so you broke it ... pc world tried that with me years ago with a desktop even though it was the monitor that was faulty ... umm so how has adding memory which it's been working fine with for months broken the monitor then??

As jomukuk said ... it's not wise to rely on recovery discs if you want to actually recover your system .. chances are it won't work. If it didn't come with the operating system on DVD then it will have a recovery partition on the hard drive. You can see it from ... Control Panel/Performance & Maintenance/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management .. think the partition is displayed as EISA Configuration (my memory might have failed me there though ).

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You only need two tools - WD40 and duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use WD40. If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape. :0)

I carry a "Which? Shoppers' Rights Card" (from 2003) in my wallet as a reminder, but also as a subtle message to shops that i know my rights.

From Dealing with faulty goods



So, it appears that Currys have to prove that you broke the laptop, and not the other way around!!!

mb

You could have wiped the disk and installed nix and it would STILL be covered by warranty.
Do NOT believe their bull.

re: Recovery disks. This is now the norm for OEMs as they reduce costs by making YOU buy a blank cd to burn the ISO to. And.. they have ripped you off because that recovery partition is using up space that YOU want to use. It's happening all over in all industries. I am a trucker and when collecting pallets from the originee they now only gives one P.O.D instead of the usual three (leaf). This means they have passed on the cost to us because we now have to make photocopies.

Ridiculous isn't it.

Point to note. Buyer beware when using those kind of stores.

I regularly build my own machines and it's impossible to build a package for the price they can, even without an O/S. So just how cheap are the components inside that machine ?

[Edit] Just re-read the OP and he said Laptop not desktop. Can't home build those....YET !! My comments on Warranty are still valid though.

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The Box said "Windows XP or better" ... So I installed Ubuntu

Now - not advocating this path , but a word to those etc .Daughter bought a laptop secondhand for GD as a surprise present for Xmas - and as Gramps I got involved - OS - SUSPECT it was XP ,BUT no recovery disk - so off to the bay of pirates I went - there to dig up a treasure trove of an OS of XP Pro ,with key, also accepted by MS ( THE GOD OF ALL THINGS COMPUTING).

So perhaps a visit to the bay of Pirates might pay dividents ( the >>>>>>>>.org ) ,hint etc
PS -I've also had a copy of Autoroute 2010 of of it -waiting for Virgin ti start shouting about excessive downloads via torrent .

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

They won't complain to you, they'll throttle your bandwidth and slow things down.
I can use TPB once or twice, but then my isp just stops allowing traffic....so I use an anon proxy and things work just fine...then back to direct connect, and nothing.

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

T & C states different - so I just complain about reduced B/W - and how the costs for migration ( supossed to be free ) from 2mb to 10 mb have gone up -and e mail to higher ups - amazing just how they can find "problems " with the network when you start nitpicking .Time for all customers to stand up and be counted ,me thinks .

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

There is a small possibility that this was a software issue. Did he keep up with the security updates (there have been a few for Win7) because if not this kind of thing can still happen without knowingly installing any new software. It's called a "drive-by-download" and usually happens if a website (or a banner ad) gets hacked and is infected with malware, or if you happen to visit sites that actually make their money doing this (free porn sites are the most common, closely followed by the free smileys sites that you see on banner ads.

It is more likely to be a hardware issue though. Windows 7 is pretty damn good, since it's basically Vista with 3 years worth of patches and fixes to bring it up to standard. Unfortunately the only way to be sure is to run the recovery disk and restore the machine to the base software, however there are other ways to try it. visit www.memtest86.com and download their CD image, burn that, boot from it and let it run for at least 12 hours, that will test for faulty memory on your PC.


Be careful going down the bittorrent route. You can end up with a modified CD image that comes preloaded with spyware and also, botach, if you were to download an "OEM" CD image of XP (this is no-longer an issue in Vista or Win 7) then the key stuck to the bottom or side of your machine will work and at that point you are 100% legal. Microsoft genuinely don't care if you download a blagged CD. They even publish MD5 hashes so that you can verify that your download is genuine and unmodified. All they care about is the product key. Use the one that came with your PC and they're happy. Use a blagged key that's been all over the internet and eventually MS will block your access to WindowsUpdate and have popups appearing reminding you that your copy of Windows is not genuine, and nag you to buy a real one.

Even if you have "voided the warranty" by not making a recovery disk it doesn't affect your rights in law. Even if no warranty is offered the goods must be of merchantable quality. The warranty, if it means anything, can only extend your legal rights not replace them with the manufacturers own conditions. The small claims court is very useful in cases like this. I have used it three times against retailers who had refused to replace faulty goods and, in each case, just serving the notice was sufficient to make them change their minds. It is a lot of hassle and expense fore them to contest a claim for a fe hundred pounds. But is even better to deal with small local shops who value there reputation.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/10/windows_7_the_f.html

http://www.computer-juice.com/forums/f48/superantispyware-windows-7-blue-screen-uninstall-remove-crash-fix-26645/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137701/New_flaw_causes_Blue_Screen_of_Death_on_Vista_Windows_7

It seems from a quick search that the new os (win7) is just as prone to the old[er] issues to not working.
A lot seem to be centered around security software.

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

So one security flaw, something that happens to all OSes, yes even Linux and Mac OS and two blue screens caused by 3rd party software, both of which by design burrow deep into the system and hook their own code in at a really low level. It's hardly Windows ME all over again now is it?

Norton in particular is renound for being a piece of shit that only survives by marketing. Norton products have not been good since Peter Norton sold the rights to his name and image over to Symantec Corp, a company who seem to ruin every product they purchase.

Thanks everyone for the input.
Right! The state of play now is that I did a factory-like restore and created the restore disc which was three DVDs worth.
There is nothing added software wise and it still insists on crashing, so in view of the fact it is less than a month old do I have to accept a repair and do I have to go via their bloody annoying 'Tech Guys' route just to get a return number?
Or am I able to return it to the store?
Sorry about this but I did this as a favour and now it's becoming a right pain in the arse.
I can't seem to find a difinitive guide to my rights and think it unfair to have to dance to Curry's tune.

If it's got a fresh software install then either their default software image is faulty (possible, but unlikely) or the hardware is faulty.

Either way you were sold defective goods and you should demand a refund. Once you have your money back, go and buy a decent laptop (not Packard Bell) from a decent retailer (not Dixons group) for a lower price. Unfortunately the Dixons group choose to ignore the sale of goods act or state that actually obeying the damn law is "not our policy" so you may well be in for a fight here.

Personally I would go for a Lenovo Thinkpad (formerly IBM Thinkpad) as they are a good, solid, sturdy design (I've dropped mine onto hard car park floors on a number of occasions and it still carries on working, with only a few scuffs on the corners to show how it's been treated). Failing that one of Dell's business laptops (ie. ones branded Lattitude, rather than Inspiron) as again these are well made and reliable, unlike their consumer laptops which are cheap and flimsy so that they can offer the highest spec at the lowest price.