MikeStroud
Member
I bought an expensive (£2k ish) AIO from PCS in 2016 and was very pleased with it. Now I accept stuff goes wrong and a small PSU board was found to be a fire risk and PCS asked me if I wanted to return the PC or fit the new PSU board myself. I did the latter and the PC has been great ever since. Stuff goes wrong, I accept that, and in this case PCS dealt with it well so it didn't bother me at all and very pleased with that product and WAS happy to use PCS again
Now last month (Dec 2021) I bought an expensive (to me £2k ish) laptop with lots of fast RAM, fast SSD and fast CPU etc but when I got it it immediately exhibited issues; summarised below:
1 - The laptop wouldn't reliably switch on. At best it would take 6 mins to turn on. Quite embarrassing when people came round to see my new PCS laptop and found it wouldn't even turn on reliably. I assumed the problem was me and that I wasn't holding the power button in long enough or for too long etc. PCS support weren't overly helpful and suggested things like taking the battery out (requires removing back cover etc). Anyway I recalled something from years ago where computers were set up to look at the A:\ drive first before the C:\ drive where the OS was so I thought maybe there is something like that here slowing things down. After some faffing (I am no expert here) I got into the UEFI and found the OS SSD was actually listed as the 6th device to boot from instead of the 1st. So I changed it to the 1st and now the laptop boots much faster, still not as fast as I'd expect with the hardware but nevertheless in say tens of seconds instead of 6mins+ as before. So I can live with that.
Question: Why do PCS ship machines set up like this? See picture attached showing boot order as supplied (red arrows are mine).
2 - I ordered Office 2019 home version with the laptop. I started using it and after a week or so it greyed out all options and stated "unlicensed". It gave an "Update Now" option but pressing that did nothing and kept pushing me towards buying Office365 which I don't want. Anyway I called PCS support about this and they tried various things including connecting remotely and downloading/running "office fix" which didn't fix it despite several gos. This particular engineer couldn't fix the issue so said he'd get 2nd line to authorise Office or something and I asked that someone call me back to say when it was done. Needless to say no one called me back.
In the end I spoke to at least 7 different engineers about this issue. To be fair all seemed knowledgeable but none owned the problem til it was completed successfully. One lied about me getting a call back which I never got. Only one (Sam Davonport) recognised that I needed someone to actually own the problem from beginning to end. You have no idea how frustrating it is to have to explain the issue repeatedly then get the same suggestion on how to fix it, then to have to explain that's already been tried and failed. Extremely frustrating and for weeks the laptop was a useless paper weight. It turns out PCS were having some issue authorising Office which wasn't only affecting my laptop. As I said before I do not mind problems, stuff happens, but PCS's way of dealing with them is hopeless and extremely frustrating for customers. The engineers seem capable but they gave me the problem of having to manage the problem with 8 different engineers none of whom knew what the last had already tried. PCS need to assign an engineer to sort out each ticket until the customer is satisfied, right now I wasted hours on the phone and by email chasing this, waiting for call back that never came, updating multiple engineers on the story so far. All in all a support shambles.
Question: Why can't PCS simply assign one engineer to each ticket? I accept people go on leave or sick or different shifts etc so can't always be achieved but the system I experienced is frustrating.
3 - Now for both of these issues I initially raised tickets via the technical support ticket system at https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/contact-us/ which is now no longer there. I never heard anything back from those tickets at all, so had to report the issues again by email. Why no response to the tickets I raised through the portal? Just added further to the frustration and delays in getting my tickets sorted out.
Anyway attached 3 pictures of my PCS experience so far.
Now last month (Dec 2021) I bought an expensive (to me £2k ish) laptop with lots of fast RAM, fast SSD and fast CPU etc but when I got it it immediately exhibited issues; summarised below:
1 - The laptop wouldn't reliably switch on. At best it would take 6 mins to turn on. Quite embarrassing when people came round to see my new PCS laptop and found it wouldn't even turn on reliably. I assumed the problem was me and that I wasn't holding the power button in long enough or for too long etc. PCS support weren't overly helpful and suggested things like taking the battery out (requires removing back cover etc). Anyway I recalled something from years ago where computers were set up to look at the A:\ drive first before the C:\ drive where the OS was so I thought maybe there is something like that here slowing things down. After some faffing (I am no expert here) I got into the UEFI and found the OS SSD was actually listed as the 6th device to boot from instead of the 1st. So I changed it to the 1st and now the laptop boots much faster, still not as fast as I'd expect with the hardware but nevertheless in say tens of seconds instead of 6mins+ as before. So I can live with that.
Question: Why do PCS ship machines set up like this? See picture attached showing boot order as supplied (red arrows are mine).
2 - I ordered Office 2019 home version with the laptop. I started using it and after a week or so it greyed out all options and stated "unlicensed". It gave an "Update Now" option but pressing that did nothing and kept pushing me towards buying Office365 which I don't want. Anyway I called PCS support about this and they tried various things including connecting remotely and downloading/running "office fix" which didn't fix it despite several gos. This particular engineer couldn't fix the issue so said he'd get 2nd line to authorise Office or something and I asked that someone call me back to say when it was done. Needless to say no one called me back.
In the end I spoke to at least 7 different engineers about this issue. To be fair all seemed knowledgeable but none owned the problem til it was completed successfully. One lied about me getting a call back which I never got. Only one (Sam Davonport) recognised that I needed someone to actually own the problem from beginning to end. You have no idea how frustrating it is to have to explain the issue repeatedly then get the same suggestion on how to fix it, then to have to explain that's already been tried and failed. Extremely frustrating and for weeks the laptop was a useless paper weight. It turns out PCS were having some issue authorising Office which wasn't only affecting my laptop. As I said before I do not mind problems, stuff happens, but PCS's way of dealing with them is hopeless and extremely frustrating for customers. The engineers seem capable but they gave me the problem of having to manage the problem with 8 different engineers none of whom knew what the last had already tried. PCS need to assign an engineer to sort out each ticket until the customer is satisfied, right now I wasted hours on the phone and by email chasing this, waiting for call back that never came, updating multiple engineers on the story so far. All in all a support shambles.
Question: Why can't PCS simply assign one engineer to each ticket? I accept people go on leave or sick or different shifts etc so can't always be achieved but the system I experienced is frustrating.
3 - Now for both of these issues I initially raised tickets via the technical support ticket system at https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/contact-us/ which is now no longer there. I never heard anything back from those tickets at all, so had to report the issues again by email. Why no response to the tickets I raised through the portal? Just added further to the frustration and delays in getting my tickets sorted out.
Anyway attached 3 pictures of my PCS experience so far.