Hard Drive Problems
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
This is a follow up entry to our blog posting regarding bad computer stores.
One of our good customers from Holly Springs came in the other day. She just recently found us. She has several laptops. She had a very bad experience at a computer store right near her house. We won't name names but the store is in 27540. Her laptop hard drive crashed. The store charged her $280 for a hard drive plus $120 labor to replace the hard drive and told her that her data was not recoverable. Yikes! Our price would have been less than half of that! The hard drive should have been under $100. $280 is highway robbery.
She brought the drive to us for a second opinion and we recovered all of the data that she wanted. (Sometimes data really is not recoverable, and this was a more advanced recovery, but we got it when the other store couldn't. See: Data Recovery).
To top it all off she had to bring the laptop to us. It was running slow and crashing and the other store wanted to charge her to look at it again even though they had just worked on it. We plugged it in, tested the hard drive & it failed. The drive installed was defective.
The defective drive could have been an honest mistake. The data recovery may have been over their head. But the $400 charge to replace it was just wrong. We make most of our money on services here. We currently sell Hitachi hard drives which have a 3yr warranty and they're marked up about $15. The behavior of the above store is absolutely ridiculous- what makes us cringe is the combination of inexperience and overcharging.
posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 6:26 PM,
