Computer repair guy lying?

[sethmachine]

Hi,

So a year or so my old Acer laptop stopped working. It was about ~5 years old and I guess this was expected. I brought it to a local repair shop, and the guy told me the problem was the harddrive had died. So he replaced it and everything worked again.

A few months later after the first repair the computer stopped working. But being very lazy and ignorant, I didn't bring it back to the repair shop until a year later, partly because I had acquired new machines and didn't need the old one anymore.

In any case, when I brought it back, the repair guy told me that the new hard drive had also died again. I was a bit confused, as it was a brand new hard drive that was just a year old, and the last one had lasted about 5 years (and was a much older model). But since the warranty was void, he wanted to essentially charge me again for replacing the hard drive.

As I didn't need the machine, I decided to put it away, though I needed the files on the hard drive. He wanted to charge $100 to extract the files. I decided to see what I could do on my own (I still have a degree in Computer Science) since the need wasn't urgent.

So I went to Best Buy and acquired a SATA usb cable for about $20. To my amazement, when I plugged in the supposedly dead hard drive to my laptop, I was able to read all of the files! And the hard drive was spinning fine.

So this had me thinking--how could a hard drive be dead if it can still be read by a SATA cable, which has the teeth as that inside the laptop?

I opened up my old laptop, and then discovered what I believe the problem was. The hard drive mount for some reason wasn't secure, so with a little bit of force in the right direction, the hard drive could fall off the SATA teeth inside the laptop.

To test my "theory," I secured the hard drive as best I could and started the computer up. It ran perfectly, and has been running perfectly since then (no random crashes or hard drive failures). Of course I keep it in a static position (since it's a laptop). But it works fine.

Now when I look back I feel like the repair guy was being deceptive and perhaps even lying. He told me that the hard drive was dead and needed to be replaced, which would have cost $200 again from him. In all his expertise and my non-expertise, I can't understand how he could fail to notice that the hard drive simply wasn't secured. So if I was completely ignorant and followed his advice, I'd have paid $200 to replace a very new, functional hard drive, with another one. And I'd have the same damn problem from before of the hard drive not being secure.

So I am now wondering if the original hard drive might not have ever died, but actually it was the same issue I had experienced, but I haven't tested this yet. I assume if it works with the SATA cable then that hard drive isn't dead?

Edit: So my super old hard drive that was supposedly dead and that got replaced for $200.00 seems to be working fine in that I can read the files with the SATA cable. Though I haven't tried putting it back into the old laptop yet.

So should I do anything? Tell the repair guy he's wrong? Or even try to get a refund / compensation for what I believe to be lying? Or is this deceptive practice still legal?

 

[edo494]

I dont think you are eligable for refund, and imo he was intentionally saying t is not eorking, to grt money off of you. If not, then he is kind of shitty repairer.

It cant be dead if you can read and/or write to it

 

[Dr Super Good]

Those repair shop guys basically have no electronic skills and instead rely on decision trees and other such "for idiot" approaches to find the problem.

The result was "the hard disk is not working" so the simplest solution is to say it needs replacing. He was not wrong, the hard disk certainly was not working. However his solution is basically the only thing he is qualified to do, change hard disks since he has absolutely no understanding of how stuff works at all. The reality is that the hard disk did not need to be changed, purely some loose stuff fixed. Such ignorance should be punished!

I advise trying to find if that shop is on any sort of ratting website and writing a very bad review about it. Also name and shame the shop, edit your main post to include exactly which shop and preferably the guy who served you. Finally you can try posting about this on social networks. The more internet presence that the shop is bad, hopefully the less business he will do.

 

[Velmarshal]

Well if he just refitted the HDD, he wouldnt have gotten 200$ from you.
Always do the diagnostics yourself when possible.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

I once had random crashes on my machine (long time ago... before I had enough knowledge about computers and electrics in general).

So I sent my computer in to the hardware support of the store I bought it in.
They kept it for almost 2 weeks (I couldn't write some of my school papers because of that), before returning it to me with a "we found nothing, but we assume it's a software thing, so we re-installed your OS" statement.
Needless to say all my data on the C: drive was gone and they didn't do a backup first. I was really angry at that time, simply because I could have done THAT by myself in less time. With a data backup.

However, the occasional crashes did not go away. But I finally found a way to perfectly reproduce the crash: When starting Witcher 1 (it was a brand new release back then), the machine crashed 100% of the time.

So with that knowledge, after almost half a year, I decided to send the machine in again. It was several weeks before the end of the warranty and I didn't want to miss that date.
Again, it took almost 2 weeks before I got it back. And again, they just told me they did hardware checks on everything and "everything is running fine... we could not reproduce the crashes.".
So, as I had given them a sure-fire method to reproduce the crash, I started The Witcher. And it crashed again.

So I finally did the right decision and decided to fix this problem on my own. As reinstalling OS and updating BIOS didn't fix the issue, I assumed a hardware defect... even though the support guys told me they did checks on the hardware. So I first did a little internet search on where to start. I found a website (doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately, it was really helpful for troubleshooting hardware) that had a small selection tree on how to find out what component could have a defect and why. I did that and since my crashes were pretty much random and mostly time-dependant, the result showed me that it would most likely be a memory issue.

So I decided to start with the RAM and then with the HDD. I had 4 blocks RAM on my mainboard back then. After just removing 2 of them, the system suddenly went fine. No crashes, Game started without a crash. I wanted to double-check this, so I put them back in. Crashed. Then I replaced the two blocks of RAM with the other two to see if it's the actual RAM that is the culprit, or just the number of RAM blocks I used. It was the latter.

I googled this issue; just entered my mainboard name and "crashes" in the search field. And instantly found MULTIPLE forum threads about a hardware incompatibilities with this particular mainboard when using 4 blocks of RAM.

I was angry as hell, as you can imagine. Not only did they not even bother to just fucking google the problem, they didn't even came up with the (from my current perspective, now that I've got way more experience and knowledge about computers) MOST LOGICAL solution. What's even worse is, I gave them a sure-fire way to reproduce the problem and they didn't even bothered trying it even once.

I still had a week of warranty left, so I decided to go to that shop. Keep cool, I said to myself, no reason to be angry, you just want this fixed and you are fine. After explaining my finding, they offered to replace the (read again: incompatible to the mainboard specs!) 4 RAM blocks by 2 RAM blocks of twice the size. But as the new RAM they wanted to give me had cost more than my 4 smaller blocks, they actually wanted to charge me plus for that.

So I said 'screw this!' and gave them hell. And I did.

Actually, there were three customers in that shop that left immediately after they heard my discussion with the hardware support. Not only did they sell me a non-working product, they also obviously didn't have the competence to troubleshoot a known incompatibility you could find in less than 1 minute of web research. After demanding to speak to a superior, the assistant agreed to give me the two RAM blocks for free.

And of course, I never went to that shop again. Several years later, they closed doors (it was a 'Vobis' store, a company that was pretty big in the late 90's in germany, but they went bankrupt in 2008 ... don't know if this chain still exists. I suppose not.)


That is my experience with computer tech support.


Bottom line: if you have a computer problem, trust a friend who knows what he is doing instead of contacting support. It's just wasted time.