PC World www.pcworld.co.uk Review

Overall Rating

They sell games / software (but what computer shop doesn't)

The Tech Guys / Staff attitude

I bought a laptop from Sony over a year and half ago... got a message on the laptop not long back saying the hard drive was failing and to back up data.... which I did.

Laptop was running fine still but after a week I thought I should take it to the Tech guys at PC World.

I paid them 69.99 and they said they would call me in a few days once they had ran tests on the machine.

A few days later I got the call saying to come pick up my laptop, upon arriving at PC World they said they had ran diagnostics and there was nothing wrong with the hard drive, they had formatted / System restored it as well as it may of been an error that it was saying that there was something wrong... hmmmm, so I took it back home.... Only to find that when I switched it on it would just be a blank screen reporting operating system not found. Ok I paid 1600.00 for this a year and a half ago and have never had it say this... I took it back and they took it back in, went to pick it up a week later and they stated they had sorted the problem, I thanked them and returned back home (stupid of me not to test it in the store as the journey is about half an hour each way)

Ok so its not saying the previous error now but low and behold it wont get any further than the windows loading section at the beginning, I sat here for 15 minutes watching the windows bar load.

I kept calm and played a little bit of chillout music in my car on the half an hour return to the store.... And again they said they would need it in for another week as they were very busy, not once did I get an apology.

Week later I returned to the store and they said they have resolved it and it is starting fine now, they tried to give some sort of explanation as to why it wouldn't start but it flew straight over my head... I asked them to turn it on instore just to show me..... Oh what a surprise, its stuck on the windows vista loading bar, I was told that it wasn't doing this earlier.

I asked them to return my 69.99.

Took the laptop round my friends who is really good with computers in general, he searched the web for ideas on the problem, he found that with my hard drive being a Raid drive *2 drives working together* sometimes one can fail, so he formatted the system stopped one of the hard drives from operating and installed Vista on its own on the other drive..... And now it works, all I need to do now is get a Professional computer person to remove this drive and fit a brand new one and there should be no problems.......

Who would have thought that a friend of mine who works in a powerstation can get my computer running again (and for free) and a big company who claim to be PC EXPERTS could not seem do it when I offered them 70 quid

I'll never use these guys again.