Nasty Con
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 07:37PM I'm out visiting the in-laws at the moment. My father in law has a computer which he finds very useful, but a couple of weeks ago it broke. It started displaying strange messages on boot up and after a chat on the phone we decided that it was hardware. So he called in a chap who advertised in the local press as a computer fixer. This "engineer" turned up and took a look at the machine, agreed that it was broken, said it was too old to repair/not worth mending and then asked for 25 quid call out fee. Which he got (having rather presciently not advertised a no fix, no fee policy). We took a look and found that it was the power supply, dropped in a replacement and the machine woke up and ran a treat.
This is a truly nasty little business. It was very obvious to us that the power supply was wrong (if the BIOS reports 4.3 volts on the 5 volt rail the number of suspects is somewhat limited) and so I'm inclined to not give this chap the benefit of the doubt. So if you are calling someone out to mend your hardware you should make sure that they are no fix, no fee operators.
Life
Reader Comments (3)
A massively obese chap turned up and without even opening the PC (my father presumed this was because the man was too fat to fit under the desk) told my father the computer was completely dead and the only thing left to do was to buy another one... and he just happened to have a wide selection of massively overpriced pcs back in his shop.
Fortunatly my dad rang me before taking his advice, where I told him that he should take it for a second opinion. It was a simple faulty power supply, fixed for the price of a couple of pints and a kebab.
It's quite scary really.