What to do about a lemon computer

[Mister P-Mosh]

I've not had to purchase hardware for a while, so I went to a place near where I work that had what I thought was a good deal on a PC. They had brand names that I was familiar with, and although it was not the greatest PC, it was good enough to serve my purposes, I thought.

I purchased it on Saturday, and by Sunday it had stopped working. Basically, it pretended to boot up, but the monitor didn't turn on, nor did the PC get on the network, so I took it back on Monday to try to get a refund, which the stupid @sshole running the place refused to do. He said that they only allow people to get work done on them and have them fixed by his people for one year as the warranty states, but that you can't return them without paying a 15% restocking fee on bad hardware. Anyway, I was ....ed off, but I went through with letting them give me a replacement and it worked so I brought it home and everything was fine...

Until now. It's been about two weeks, and now the PC just randomly stopped working in much the same way as the previous one. The monitor doesn't pick up the signal, it doesn't get on the network, etc. I've been threatening to go down there and do some serious harm to the manager there who was rude with me, and I've got other ideas to ruin his business if I have to anyway. I'd really like to take a baseball bat to the guy's face, but I don't want legal trouble, as satisfying as crushing his skull would be.

Do any of you know if there are any legal options? I plan to contact the Better Business Bureau, but this guy is from India and probably won't care what they have to say, and I doubt Texas has any lemon laws that cover computers. I've also considered calling my credit card company, but it's been a few weeks so I don't know what they would do or anything. I'd also like to make sure that these pricks can't come back and ruin my credit somehow if I do manage to void out the money I paid them. Any suggestions?

[Shellon]

report em and call credit card company absolutelly

check out BBB site. you can post information about a specific company. Also might be able to find out how many others are unhappy.

[Tom Strange]

yeah MasterP... call the CC company... it depends on which card you used but most of them don't like unsatisfied customers...

[herbiejuan]

Call yer credit card company and tell them it is defective and you want yer money back. Then call the bbb and report the problem to them. Then call the manufacturer and tell them the difficulties you've been experiencing with that particular vendor of theirs which ought to get the ball rolling if nothing else does.

Good luck

[WordWolf]

I've been told the Dept of Consumer Affairs gets better results than the

Better Business Bureau. I'd tell BOTH groups.

===================

If nobody can get your money back for you,

I'd look into suing them in Small Claims Court.

Legally, you are entitled to pay a fair price

for a product as advertised and free of

defects.

[Mister P-Mosh]

Thanks. I'll try all of the above options. I already got the form for the BBB, and I bought it with Amex and they seem to be pretty good about such things too.

Before I try to return it I need to look into getting the HD backed up somehow. I didn't have a chance to burn DVD roms of it before the thing went bad since I was still in the process of installing the software. Unfortunately I had already copied over all my files from the hard drive on the old PC that was going bad, plus that drive is completely screwed so I couldn't keep a backup of that.

[Tom Strange]

well... what "brand" was it? don't keep us in the dark bro!

[Mister P-Mosh]

quote:

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Originally posted by Tom Strange:

well... what "brand" was it? don't keep us in the dark bro!

---

The company I got it from was UBM. It's a noname case, with an AMD Athlon processor, a Shuttle motherboard, and a Western Digital hard drive. All fairly standard parts, and they were new out of the box. The only brand I haven't used before is Shuttle, which I haven't found a lot of bad reviews of online.

[Zixar]

P-Mosh: Buy a new HD big enough to hold your data, then take it to a friend's computer and clone the lemon drive onto your new drive with the new drive's software. Maxtor has "MaxBlast", don't know what the others have, but I've done the same thing with MaxBlast many times. Best Buy frequently has 80GB drives on sale for $50 or so.

Call Amex immediately and tell them what's going on. They have excellent Buyer Protection Customer Service for stuff like this. If you didn't get what you paid for, and the store won't make it 100% good (i.e. that stupid 15% fee), odds are excellent you won't get charged for it. Amex can tell you what you need to do.

[Mister P-Mosh]

Zixar,

Thanks for the advice. I've been considering buying an external HD enclosure with USB to put it in temporarily and take it to work and copy it over there, then buy a cheap HD like you mentioned to put in it permanently.

[Zixar]

That will also work. I saw an empty IDE-USB2 enclosure at WalMart the other day for $50.

[danteh1]

Also i noticed that the Sam's Club in Lake Manawa (south of Council Bluffs, Iowa) had good prices on new Western Digital hard drives. a 160 gig drive was about $119.95 before tax and a 200 Gig WD drive was about $159.95.

Another thing, stear clear of the EMachines that Wal-Mart sells. I know of 2 different people who got them and they went out about as fast as your computer. It would be better to go with a name brand like Dell or Gateway or another big name company that has a good track record on thier warrenty coverage.