Laptop

[Kushan]

Just to add my 2c here.


This is the laptop I received this week:



Yes, the bottom really is hanging off! I've spoken to their support and they ASSURE me that it must have happened in transit. Considering the grief people have with YODEL, it makes sense. But I'm not convinced. The panel has almost no flex in it and it overlaps the case quite a bit - I cannot see how it could have just popped out, not unless the box was hurled over the street. Funny, though, the box is spotless, not a mark or a dent on it. I really do wonder if PCS is just trying to pass off the blame on YODEL here. I'm not a happy customer.

 

[PCS]

Just to add my 2c here.


This is the laptop I received this week:

View attachment 596

Yes, the bottom really is hanging off! I've spoken to their support and they ASSURE me that it must have happened in transit. Considering the grief people have with YODEL, it makes sense. But I'm not convinced. The panel has almost no flex in it and it overlaps the case quite a bit - I cannot see how it could have just popped out, not unless the box was hurled over the street. Funny, though, the box is spotless, not a mark or a dent on it. I really do wonder if PCS is just trying to pass off the blame on YODEL here. I'm not a happy customer.

If the laptop was dropped there is a remote possibility that the panel could have popped out. There is also a possibility that on screwing in the panel our production has not popped it in correctly and it's also been missed in QC. We're not perfect, and we're sorry for this. Either way, we'll put it right for you as quickly as possible and we're sorry for any inconvenience caused.

 

[Kushan]

If the laptop was dropped there is a remote possibility that the panel could have popped out. There is also a possibility that on screwing in the panel our production has not popped it in correctly and it's also been missed in QC. We're not perfect, and we're sorry for this. Either way, we'll put it right for you as quickly as possible and we're sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Except you're not putting it right, you're refusing to do anything other than have me return it so it can be checked again, which will take a least a week. After a month delay, why am I the only person that feels this is ridiculous? All I'm asking for (which I detailed in another thread that has been deleted) is for you to extend the warranty in the event that a component has been damaged. If the laptop is fine, then it wont cost anything, however if it is damaged then it's going to cost what it'll cost to replace it should I send it off now.

 

[PCS]

We have deleted the other thread because you have posted multiple threads with the same problem. We're not going to have a heated debate with your on our forums. We are sorry for the problem. It's simply a plastic cover that has either popped out or not been fitted correctly by a human, and then slipped through our QC procedures. Have you never changed the batteries on your remote control before and put the cover back on slightly wrong?

The quickest solution to fix the problem is to simply remove the screws on the cover and re-seat it. Problem fixed. The cover is bent outwards as opposed to inwards and therefore will not have caused any problems to any components, and if it had then the damage would be immintent and not something that would occur in 13 months time.

If you're not happy to remove the cover we have offered to take the laptop back and fix this for you. If you're still not happy then I'm sorry, we'll take it back and give you a full refund.

Once again, we're sorry for this problem Kushan.

 

[Kushan]

The problem isn't the inconvenience from attaching the plastic cover. As I sated (at least in the now-deleted thread), I am more than capable of doing this. The problem comes from the fact that according to your representatives, it was definitely done in transit and couldn't possibly have been human error.

I'm quoting Rick Donnellan from your technical support:

That is highly unlikely as the laptop is built by one person, checked by another person, tested by another person and pre-loaded with the operating system and drivers and burnt in before it is sent out. This is a transit issue, not a quality control issue.

If that's the case, then the laptop must have been dropped pretty hard, which could cause all sorts of issues down the line. That's my problem - what happens down the line. I could run all the checks in the world and not come up with anything, then in a day or a week or 15 months from now, a critical component could give in due to excessive wear from heat. That's just an example and that's my concern. According to your representative, it was definitely damaged in transit.

Or lets look at it another way - someone else has had an identical experience to myself and someone has pointed out that perhaps there's a design flaw or something causing it. Design flaws have a habit of not truly rearing themselves until down the line - which brings me back to my point, I'm concerned with the longevity of the thing and all I want is peace of mind that the laptop will be working fine 2 years from now.

EDIT: I would also like to point out that I have spoken to two different representitives via your online tech support and BOTH have abruptly left the conversation without warning (one of them has done it twice!). I have been polite the whole time and I'm even willing to post the log here to prove it. Ridiculous!

 

[PCS]

In your opening post you stated that you were not convinced that this had happened during delivery and that it was more likely to be the result of human error. We can only verfiy this by taking the laptop back for further evaluation.

Our call centre representative would naturally assume that this happened during delivery because since we started offering the Optimus II, of which thousands have been placed onto the market we have suddently had two cases where the panel was not connected correctly.

My thoughts are also in agreement with you that this is infact human error, and the idea that it's a sudden design flaw that's just happened despite thousands of other models being purchased is beyond reason.

You're obviously not happy and I can understand your frustration, for which we can only apologise. We can take the laptop back and fix the issue, build you another one or give you a refund.

 

[Kushan]

You're right, the tone of this thread is quite poor, however that's coming from the fact that I sent an email 2 days ago and got no response, was told there were no managers in yesterday and I received no response today. This is on top of a month-long delay with equally poor communication. It's not just one issue, it's a series of issues. If it only took a week to arrive, I'd be more than willing to send it off, but it has taken a month as it is, another week of waiting is just a joke.

Ok - PCS has just offered a rebuild on the laptop, that actually seems worthwhile. Now I wouldn't expect you to send out a second laptop without receiving the first one back (see, I'm not that unreasonable), but would it be possible for me to at least hold onto this one until the replacement has been built, checked and is ready to go? I can easily backup and migrate my data and presuming YODEL are up to the task, it should be possible to send the old one off to you guys and have the new one sent to me in the space of a couple of days, minimising the inconvenience.



Also, here's the unedited chat log as the window is still open on my end (can also post screenshots if necessary), posting because there might be a problem with it or something (had to pastebin it because it was too long to post): http://pastebin.com/zzFDZxGY

 

[PCS]

We will build you a new order now and collect the other on delivering the new one, therefore no downtime for you.

Have you activated Windows yet? If not, please don't.

 

[Kushan]

We will build you a new order now and collect the other on delivering the new one, therefore no downtime for you.

Have you activated Windows yet? If not, please don't.

I didn't order a windows license as I had my own. The first thing I did was wipe the HDD to install it, so don't worry about that. I'll also wipe it before I send it back (it'd just be encrypted anyway).

Thank you for coming to an agreement, I do appreciate it. I understand that mistakes and accidents can happen, but it was more the communication issues that were frustrating.

 

[PCS]

The new replacement has been processed. When it is dispatched please package up the existing laptop and have it ready to swap with the courier when he arrives.

 

[Kushan]

The new replacement has been processed. When it is dispatched please package up the existing laptop and have it ready to swap with the courier when he arrives.

Thank you! I've sent an email off to the person who just gave me a call, but just in case - keep in mind that I requested a second HDD bay instead of an optical drive and that isn't on the order yet. Not sure if that's necessary to note or not.

And while I'm at it, is the previously mentioned Good Will Gesture part of the package or have I managed to burn that bridge?

 

[PCS]

Thank you! I've sent an email off to the person who just gave me a call, but just in case - keep in mind that I requested a second HDD bay instead of an optical drive and that isn't on the order yet. Not sure if that's necessary to note or not.

And while I'm at it, is the previously mentioned Good Will Gesture part of the package or have I managed to burn that bridge?

We will supply a second HDD bay instead of the ODD (cost netural). We cannot extend the warranty, we are replacing the laptop for you with a new one.

 

[Milkybarkid]

Try getting that kind of service with a problem with another company, you would be banging your head for weeks.

 

[doobie]

Try getting that kind of service with a problem with another company, you would be banging your head for weeks.

I agree with Milkybarkid, considering the tone of your complaint, you got great service you dont normally find nowadays. Well done PCS.

Just a little note - I deal with couriers all the time. Not just one, but all the big players and a few smaller ones. If I had a fiver for everything Ive ever had damaged-in-transit, Id be laughing. Now, as I was the one doing the building and packing (not PCs, but electrical equipment/machinery, just as sensitive to knocks etc) so I KNEW that I was sending stuff out perfect, no damage, not even a fingerprint on it. Everytime I got something returned, the courier would swear blind they never dropped/kicked/shoved/slammed-brakes-on-cos-driver-was-eating-a-bacon-sandwich - "not our drivers - they are the epitome of courtesy and gentleness......"

Whatever. Either way, when any company sends any product to a customer - the minute the courier takes charge of it, the supplier has no control. A tracking number proves nothing. Id tread more carefully in future when complaining - you might just get the other 99% of companies that will tell you to deal with the courier, "not my problem....etc".

 

[Kushan]

I agree with Milkybarkid, considering the tone of your complaint, you got great service you dont normally find nowadays. Well done PCS.

Just a little note - I deal with couriers all the time. Not just one, but all the big players and a few smaller ones. If I had a fiver for everything Ive ever had damaged-in-transit, Id be laughing. Now, as I was the one doing the building and packing (not PCs, but electrical equipment/machinery, just as sensitive to knocks etc) so I KNEW that I was sending stuff out perfect, no damage, not even a fingerprint on it. Everytime I got something returned, the courier would swear blind they never dropped/kicked/shoved/slammed-brakes-on-cos-driver-was-eating-a-bacon-sandwich - "not our drivers - they are the epitome of courtesy and gentleness......"

Whatever. Either way, when any company sends any product to a customer - the minute the courier takes charge of it, the supplier has no control. A tracking number proves nothing. Id tread more carefully in future when complaining - you might just get the other 99% of companies that will tell you to deal with the courier, "not my problem....etc".

I realise my tone was brash, but this thread was only put up after days of trying to get through to someone. And the Saga continues.

OK, so I have received my REPLACEMENT laptop. I took delivery of it yesterday. Problem is, the courier didn't take the old one back. I spoke to him myself and he said he had no information about any kind of swap or anything. So I have two laptops right now. I sent an email yesterday to Jack Turner, who left an answerphone message for me last week but he hasn't got back to me (I sent him an email last week at his request as well and never got a response, either, so I'm wondering if I have the right email address or not - I didn't receive any bounce backs, though).

Ok so that's a courier gaff or something, not a major concern as I'm sure it'll be sorted out at some point - after all, it's PCS's property, technically.

Now onto the new laptop. This one came significantly better packaged than the first and after an inspection, it looks to be in perfect condition and lives much more up to PCS's reputation. There was also no additional free games as promised, but that's not my main concern.

I had issues when it came to installing windows. I powered on the laptop and got the pre-installed windows startup screen, which PCS puts on all their machines. I had my own license (as well as a customised build of windows) so I powered it down, restarted and attempted to install from my USB stick, just like I did with the first laptop.
Unfortunately, at about 10% of the "extracting files" part of the install, I got an error stating "Windows Cannot Copy Files Required For Installation". Now I thought this was my fault, it was possibly the USB stick I was using or maybe even a mistake I made when creating my custom windows build (even though the exact same USB stick/files were used fine for the last laptop), so I plugged the stick into my machine and ran a full chkdisk - no problems found. I then formatted it and used a completely untouched windows build straight from MSDN (and verified the MD5 checksum) - along with Microsoft's own bootable USB creation tool.
I got the same error at about the same point during the install.

At this point, I'm a little perplexed - I'm thinking it could be the laptop or the USB stick so I need to rule something out. So out came an old, old laptop of mine from a few years ago. I plugged the USB stick in, booted it up and got windows installing. 30mins later, windows was booting just fine, no errors at all (Ironically, this laptop has a manufacturing defect which causes the bloomin' thing to die randomly, yet it lasted long enough to install windows).

Back to the PCS laptop - try again, same error. Ok so, something is going on with the laptop, but is it the HDD or something else?
At this point, I tried something else - I created multiple partitions. Whereas before I was just creating one big partition (minus the 100Mb System partition that Windows creates these days), I split the drive into 2x 250GB partitions. I attempted to install into the first partition, same error.
Restart, delete all partitions and recreate them. This time, I tried to install into partition 2 and this time, no errors.

Aha! Now we're getting somewhere. Windows booted up and the first thing I did was format the seemingly wonky partition and run a full CHKDSK. A bit later - no errors detected. Hmm.
So, I rebooted, deleted the partitions and attempted to install to just one big partition again. And, almost annoyingly - it worked, without an issue.

So I'm at a bit of an impass here - there was clearly an issue and it seems to have mysteriously resolved itself. That's not good, because it could crop up again at any point. Has anyone ever encountered an error like that? Or can anyone suggest what might have fixed it, so I can get an idea if it's permanent or not?

Plus, any recommendations on HDD checking software that's perhaps somewhat more thorough than chkdisk?

 

[PCS]

We will book in a collection for your old laptop early next week and send you a confirmation of this.

Everytime something doesn't go 100% to plan, you seem to suddenly get very worried and think that it could crop up again at any point. Not true. If you had ordered the operating system from us we would have installed it first time and you wouldn't have had that problem.

You should have formatted the disk and deleted all partitions, then created new partitions before attempting the new installation - the error you got was something and nothing, and now that you're sorted, please stop worrying!

 

[Kushan]

We will book in a collection for your old laptop early next week and send you a confirmation of this.

Everytime something doesn't go 100% to plan, you seem to suddenly get very worried and think that it could crop up again at any point. Not true. If you had ordered the operating system from us we would have installed it first time and you wouldn't have had that problem.

You should have formatted the disk and deleted all partitions, then created new partitions before attempting the new installation - the error you got was something and nothing, and now that you're sorted, please stop worrying!

I have already spoken to one of your reps and got the pickup sorted for the old laptop, so don't worry about that. I probably should have updated this post, but I figured that you guys would have known about it.

As for formatting the disk - that is the first thing I did and I did it repeatedly. I didn't specifically lay it out, however when I go to do an install on a fresh machine, the first thing I do is delete the existing partitions and format the whole lot. I even mentioned that at one point, I deleted the partitions and set up new partitions to split the drive into two 250GB chunks and had the same issue? In any case, it's probably not a good idea to just assume that I haven't tried something.

I am more than capable of installing an OS, it's not difficult as I'm sure you know and I dare say that I'm as confident at doing it as you guys are. Perhaps a little bit cautious, but then again £900 is a lot of money and I don't see the harm in being cautious about such an investment. I've already been stung by HP as they designed a laptop that seemingly dies after 18 months, so if I seem almost paranoid, that's why.

Yes, the issue may or may not crop up again in future, but at least if I could identify it then I'll know if it will or not. I'd rather spend a weekend doing some diagnostics and research than risk loosing data 6 months down the line or whatever. I don't think it's necessarily healthy to say "well it's fixed so let's not worry about it".

At no point did I imply that PCS was at fault in this instance, as I already pointed out that Windows had already been installed when it arrived - so obviously it worked when you guys built it. A fault may have developed, but that's something yet to be determined. I personally have never encountered an error like this and as much as I feel I know a lot about dealing with computers, I have no problem with asking for advice when I'm in "uncharted" territory. Particularly as this is what you guys do for a living, it just made sense to ask in case it's some sort of common issue that I've just never encountered myself. I have to say though, your response was a little bit patronising, however the rep I was speaking to yesterday was much more friendly and gave all the necessary advice. If I can't find any issues with the laptop after a weekend of Prime95, memtest, HDtune and some benchmarking software, I'll just assume it's one of "those" glitches and be happy.

 

[baines93]

I think you should re-evaluate the tone of your writing... maybe when you type, it comes across differently to how you would say the same thing, but your post wasn't really asking for advice, it instead came across very moany, and blaming... Probably why you received very little help/advice!

 

[Kushan]

I think you should re-evaluate the tone of your writing... maybe when you type, it comes across differently to how you would say the same thing, but your post wasn't really asking for advice, it instead came across very moany, and blaming... Probably why you received very little help/advice!

Well gee, I ordered a laptop on October 20th and it's now nearly December - regardless as to who's fault it is or where the blame lies, I think it's no surprise that I come across as "a bit moany". I'd expect anyone else in my position to be the same, probably worse.

Anyway, I spent the weekend running various tests and benchmarks. I did 8 passses with memtest x86 and found no errors. I ran Prime95 overnight as well and found no errors, just a fairly hot laptop (To be expected, of course) and HDTune didn't pick up any issues on either the quick or the longer scan. I even encrypted the entire drive with Truecrypt (the idea being that if a single bit was corrupt, it would break the encryption) with no issues. I also put it through the most scrutinising test of all - several hours of the Wife playing The Old Republic and she didn't have any issues, either. So the mysterious error has vanished and hopefully it won't return. I'd love to know what it was for future reference, but what can you do!

On an anecdotal note, with the first laptop one of the things I tried running was the CSS Video Stress Test (I know it's old and mostly defunct now, but I like to use it as a "quick" benchmark) and it would crash and cause the laptop to completely power off about 10 seconds in. This was one of the reasons I was concerned over what had happened to the first laptop, but I mostly disregarded it because the CSS video stress test is currently completely broken. Anyway, it runs flawlessly on this one (well, it was still looking at the floor but it didn't crash), which is running the same configuration/drivers/etc. as before so I'm wondering if the first laptop really is damaged. It may have just been a dodgy install or something and it ran other games just fine (Including the Old Republic), so who knows.

Oh and one last thing - a newer driver for the Killer Wireless had come out some time after the first laptop arrived. When I installed it, it was fine but after a reboot, I couldn't connect to my wireless any more (Limited or no connectivity). It wasn't a password issue or anything as it was connected before and had the details saved, but even after removing, readding and rebooting numerous times, no dice. Uninstalling the driver and rolling back to the previous version fixed it, so just beware that there may be issues with the latest Killer drivers.

 

[Kushan]

Update:

The courier has just come to pick up the first laptop. I was told that this would happen on Tuesday, so it caught me off guard a bit but that's fine as I had it in the office with me, anyway. However, I just thought I'd mention it in case another pickup is scheduled for tomorrow or something.