Practical Advice Laptop Help!
- Thread starter AvidFan
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Went to the shop. Assistant said it's not their problem. I asked the manager she said she'd take it in for repair. Breathed a sigh of relief. Then she said oh no actually it's not valid for that you'll have to contact the manufacturer. Go away and phone them. I burst into tears and said I ws going to take my life and name the shop in the note. I genuinely felt like doing it to. Nothing, sorry it's our policy, fuck you. Well FUCK YOU, FFS now I have to ring a number and go through pointless diagnostics, what a pile of shit HP and Argos are, I've heard of plenty of people taking things back and getting replaced, sale of goods act, etc etc Nothing. Fuck off. I am shaking like a fucking jelly I can barely type, I'm losing money with every hour that passes. I'm letting clients down, this is spiralling into a fucking nightmare I just want to end this. 😞😞😞😞
So I got to HP support woman in India who took control of my machine. Did some fairly random things like going to delete temp files (which I'd already thought of to try). Eventually she gave me some weird key press and hold combination so we could go in and update the bios. Unfortunately the message said the recovery bios is corrupted or missing. It wasn't as long to get through as I thought but I was on the phone for a bloody hour. We hit a roadblock as she needed a USB stick bigger then 8GB, I have loads of little ones but none were correct, I said I had an SSD external drive which I was happy to be wiped, but she said unless it's partitioned it can't be use. This sounds like bullshit to me. Anyway, now I have to go back to the shop where I just embarrassed myself to get the flash drive and she is due to call me back tomorrow. I am so fucking fed up with this.
https://help.argos.co.uk/help/refun...port-and-repairs/returnsproductsupportrepairs
Argos say, if it is faulty and still in the warranty then they will sort a repair or exchange or refund.
If you have to go back to the shop, print this out or show it to them on the phone. If they refuse to honour it ask them if they can give you a written statement refusing to do so so you can pass it along to your solicitor, hopefully that threat will get them moving.
If they refuse, then take it to an independent person and have them document the faults and the repair and then put in a small claims court claim.
I recently got into a spat with the DVLA, who claimed that because I didn’t tell them quickly enough that my new licence got lost on the post I had to pay for a new one. After several emails of them being outrageous i lodge a claim, they resisted it right until the last minute, but once it got scheduled they suddenly changed their mind gave me back my £20 and paid the £35 court cost. I have framed the settlement agreement and keep it as a reminder that it doesn’t matter how big and nasty you are, when you are wrong you are wrong and I won’t let you get away with it.
Argos say, if it is faulty and still in the warranty then they will sort a repair or exchange or refund.
If you have to go back to the shop, print this out or show it to them on the phone. If they refuse to honour it ask them if they can give you a written statement refusing to do so so you can pass it along to your solicitor, hopefully that threat will get them moving.
If they refuse, then take it to an independent person and have them document the faults and the repair and then put in a small claims court claim.
I recently got into a spat with the DVLA, who claimed that because I didn’t tell them quickly enough that my new licence got lost on the post I had to pay for a new one. After several emails of them being outrageous i lodge a claim, they resisted it right until the last minute, but once it got scheduled they suddenly changed their mind gave me back my £20 and paid the £35 court cost. I have framed the settlement agreement and keep it as a reminder that it doesn’t matter how big and nasty you are, when you are wrong you are wrong and I won’t let you get away with it.
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That's why I took it there, I read that on their website and I've always bought stuff from Argos instead of cheaper online for the very reason I can take it back to a shop instead of having to mess about sending it back with couriers and all that if it breaks. I think next time I might buy the bloody accident insurance they try to sell every time - then I could have just accidently dropped the laptop from a great height, and gone in to get a new one! If the Indian lady doesn't fix it tomorrow, I may try again as I would rather not have to go through packaging a laptop to send back to the HP factory and all that if I can return it to Argos and they can arrange that as they claim on their website. I did say I would raise a complaint but they didn't seem bothered. Don't get it based on what they say on the website, I will quote that in any complaint! Shit is following me around at the moment, maybe they got possessed by demons for a short time.
Ironically, when I went back, there were two different staff on, one was the one who arranged a replacement of my smart watch. I wonder what would have happened if he'd been on when I went?
Anyway, I can't do anything until tomorrow, which has eased the pressure and I managed to get some work done on my old laptop. Caught up with a few emails from people needing MY support, which is ironic. Kind of helps me get out of my own head for a bit though!
Ironically, when I went back, there were two different staff on, one was the one who arranged a replacement of my smart watch. I wonder what would have happened if he'd been on when I went?
Anyway, I can't do anything until tomorrow, which has eased the pressure and I managed to get some work done on my old laptop. Caught up with a few emails from people needing MY support, which is ironic. Kind of helps me get out of my own head for a bit though!
Don't know what the agent did, as far as I could tell she just deleted some files and did some other bits and pieces. I just opened the laptop out of curiosity to see if anything made any difference and it's like back to normal 😱 I really don't understand why a full refresh wouldn't have helped. Maybe if there is an issue with the BIOS that was affecting the new installs or something. Totally bizarre. Next time I will just call HP, could have saved myself a lot of time but am so used to helplines being absolute shit and waiting for 2 hours. Just wanted to fix it myself. Oh well, we'll get the BIOS updated or fixed tomorrow and then it should be good. I've always loved Mcafee because you chat with something and fairly quickly get an agent who will take over your machine and do things for you, looks like HP do the same. I'm glad I registered this time as I normally don't bother. I feel a bit of a fool now for wasting 2 days and going out of my mind with it. 😒
I think I know what fixed it now - she ran the sfc scannow command in cmd prompt which must have repaired something low level. Wish I'd thought of that, have done it before, my brain's just totally scrambled these last few weeks with the work, the death, the stress and other things. Oh well. Live and learn.
Looking back at my post history, as I thought this time of year seemed familiar. I had laptop issues almost to the week this time last year (this was just a week earlier). At the time I had to restore dozens of times and eventually got a Mcafee suport guy to fix things. It was another weird situation. So I should maybe beware the month of June as far as laptop issues go!
I don't believe this really. It was working fine, very fast, then the India person re-installed the BIOS. No USB stick required so I bought that for nothing! It could have been done yesterday without the USB stick as she just downloaded it and restarted. The thing is, now the BIOS has been updated, it's still working, but it's working a tad less quickly than it was before this was done. It's useable, but I can still see websites drawing, few spinning circles for a second here and there. I've been told to use it as much as possible to test it so I will - I've got another call back arranged on Monday to see where we're at. At the moment CPU and fan going like the clappers at the moment (CPU at 50-99% which never usually happens) maybe it's the BIOS update still processing. Windows update is running (I paused it in case it was causing the slow down but the agent restarted it) - so I'll let all that complete and then try again. Yesterday it was starting in literally 20 seconds to a useable state, basically can switch it on and be in Word or Excel in less than 30 seconds. So will restart after the updates and see what happens. I hope the BIOS update hasn't broken something that didn't need fixing. Guess I can talk about that on Monday. Good job my diary hasn't been appointment heavy just lately!
Yup task manager shows Windows Installer module is using most of that extra CPU, so will just let it all finish. The machine is still very useable despite this, got good ram and processor so the slow down was so weird.
Yup task manager shows Windows Installer module is using most of that extra CPU, so will just let it all finish. The machine is still very useable despite this, got good ram and processor so the slow down was so weird.
Whatever the update thing is, it's not affecting performance. I shut down then timed how long it was to start up. 18 seconds to boot up, enter my PIN, launch Internet explorer and visit here. That's how it should be and has always been, you can imagine my frustration when that process was taking up to 5 minutes!
I suppose I can understand now why Argos wouldn't take it back - if everyone who had a slow machine took it there they'd have lines around the building. I really thought having reset to factory state it was a hardware problem and I'd spent literally 18 hours trying to sort it, turns out it was a fairly simple fix as something was corrupted. I feel like an idiot for arguing with them, but I was not in my normal state of mind and I honestly thought I'd done everything. I'll definitely make a note of that sfc check and try that in any future scenarios. Wish I could go back to the shop and apologise again. I did say I was sorry when I left. I hate these times of stress when some other part of me seems to take over and take control and I become a stressed out moron. The people in the shop didn't deserve the performance I gave them, they were only doing their job. I hate this part of myself, maybe I need to do some more work, or more likely it was caused by benzo withdrawals/rebound of some kind. Oh well. I'm saying sorry here and admitting I was wrong, if that makes any difference.
Force of habit really, over the years I have found MWB and McAfee to supplement each other and offer different layers of protection, I work with sensitive data and work with an abundance of caution. Windows Defender is off due to other AVs being installed and I have them configured so they don't interfere with each other. McAfee has a basic VPN bundled in it I sometimes use. Regular scans with both give peace of mind. I know McAfee is basically rubbish, but I once got an email from the chief exec when I found his personal email and then dealt with his personal assistant who provided me with a lifetime of free premium McaAfee products, so I might as well use it 😂 Plus every time I see the name it reminds me of John's colourful life and his comment that it's the worst software on the planet. Makes me feel like a rebel 🤭