I wish to write about my sister dealing so far with this company, you can find them HERE and they go by the name of Dino PC. I already wrote about this before in my previous story but we ask, what has happened since? Is my sister now a happy end user of a fast and cheap desktop pc and was my shouts of “go to Dell” all wrong?

They admit defeat

They finally say that it could be a hardware issue and they will sink the cost (£40) of getting the product back, testing it fully and making sure she has a working computer. She really wanted her money back at this stage so she can deal with a proper company (like Dell) and in the future listen to what I have to say. The Company issue a pick up with I think FedEx and we wait. The instructions were strange, they told her to seal the case so that it if they opened it (which meant a hardware failure) she could check this. This so far sounded very dodgy to me and I advised my sister to melt candle wax (small blob) on the side of the case were the panel comes off. 

Snow and more Snow

As a stroke of bad luck though, the snow stopped the people getting to the door it seems and they were unable to pick the package up. The next day they also filed the same notice but at the same time said they left a card? It was either bad weather stopping FedEx (which meant no card) or nobody was in (which there was). DinoPC later contacted my sister and explained that they had been charged the £13 even though no pickup was made, you now begin to ask were this £40 charge came about right?

Getting Married

It seems an email came forth saying the person dealing with this collection / fix is now away as he is getting married but he shall be back on Monday – so that’s 4 days more of waiting before anything happens. Begs the question, is there only a handful of people who work there and only one can do returns? 

It gets there in the end

They arrange another collection, it gets picked up now nothing – no emails, no phone calls or even a letter to say they had got the item and how long they plan to take with this computer – we call this very bad customer service. I finally send an email near the end of the week and they respond quickly saying that the machine is in testing and takes 5 working days after which it is fixed and returned. My sister gets an email later that days (funnily enough) saying it has been fixed and despatched and will arrive the next day.

The Machine lands

So the machine turns up and with it there is a check list, it states that the motherboard was replaced and it is working and passed all the other tests. It is also ticked to say it is in 100% A1 condition physically. No power lead was in the box – that was sent with the machine but with luck she had one from the printer. The side of the case was scratched to hell – not quite the condition she sent it in. She plugged in the power cord, made sure the power switch was on, the power supply on/off switch was on and pressed the on/off switch on the front……. NOTHING.

Some random guesses

The power supply might have died, the connector from the power supply might have come loose. The CPU might have been knocked out during the journey or the motherboard might be dead all over again. It is hard to say and quite rightly she is not about to rip the machine apart and try to fix this. This will have to wait till Monday until it all start again – she will fight for her money back now as this is getting silly. The Company will have lost some money already over this considering it was £13 x 2 for delivery and the time it took the person to test it (wages).

The on-going fight

My sister is now disheartened and still without a working computer, one that she has paid for already, she wants her money back so she can go forth to say Dell and get a working computer from a company who can support her. Dino Pc will fight to the bitter end – they do not want to loose money and no way will they want to give her the money back. I have advised her to take picture of the case and email them explaining she wants her money back. Should they say no (which I suspect they will) – then this is now a matter for trading standards and/or the credit card company.

I recently had to help my sister out with a computer she bought from an Online retailer, some hands on and most remote control, I thought it would be interesting to read how I went from start to finish on working out what was wrong and getting it fixed.

Ordering the PC

The Company (DinoPC) offered a range of cheap, powerful and systems which you can tweak to find the right system, it is then built, tested and sent. You can pay extra to have it sooner which I am guessing means paying for a person to spend more time testing it before it goes out. You can also choose to have no Operating System installed, this saves money if you already have access to one for example.

In this example, she bought a Core 2 Duo 2.93Ghz with 4GIG DDR2 Ram, an ATI Graphics Card (she is not going to game) and a 500 GIG Hard drive, no monitor, keyboard or mouse as she already had these and no Operating system as this I had already, this meant the end system came out as £295 (about $470)

The initial problem

My sister lives about 120 Miles away from me so this meant the computer sat in the box until she came to my house, this is a bad idea as there is no way to get the computer back in the first 30 days if there is a fault. Once it arrived at my house, I formatted the hard drive (took a long time) and installed Windows XP Pro plus all the updates and used the supplied CD to install all the correct drivers.

Box Shifter

Before I go on, I need to explain what a box shifter is, anybody can set up a web page (company) with a choice of parts which upon getting an order, they built the computer from parts – much the same way I would do for example and chuck in the driver cd from the motherboard and the one from the graphics card. This is a far cry from Dell who have complete system on a couple of DVD’s and utility to grab the latest etc.

The Computer returns home

I thought at this stage the computer was a done deal and she got home and started using it but she was soon on the phone saying it had come up with a Blue Screen, this is known as the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Now I was not to know if a program had been installed, somebody had switched it off wrongly or whatever. I tried to walk her through the system restore but even this was proving too hard to fix over the phone with the system still dying upon starting up. I assumed it had got corrupted and explained how to re-install Windows until I got a chance to get up there.

The next visit

I took with me Windows 7 Ultimate (both 32bit and 64bit) and I got to work on trying to get this computer back to working. The first thing I noticed was no networking was shown up at all, not even in device manager. After I opened the case (not much to look at inside) I checked all cables etc and tried Windows again – magically the network not only showed up but installed and was working in true Windows 7 Fashion. I went through and installed everything but the sound was not showing up, I Used the CD Supplied and picked the Vista 64bit driver as time was not on my side and the computer was left updating and working (or so we thought).

The Computer dies

Yet another call – the computer has a Blue Screen! How can this be possible? I instructed on how to stop it rebooting so we can see the error and it was STOP 0000001A. We left the computer and then started turning to DinoPC to get this sorted, it was more then obious the computer had a hardware issue and needed returning.

DinoPC Tech Support

I was the middle man, I wrote an email which my sister basically forwarded to Tech Support, she works the same hours the Tech Support are open so no way she can sit in front of her computer and get them to diagnose this. They emailed her back suggesting that she download and burn the ISO of MemTest and test the machine. Now let us step back her one second, I have no issue with downloading an ISO, Burning the ISO to CD and pressing the right Key on the computer to boot from the CD and test the computer, after all this is my job but did they expect my sister to somehow on a computer which BSOD all the time to download an ISO, work out how to burn the ISO and use the correct software and then know what to do to make the computer boot from CD? Is this not going a bit too far in the realm of tech support and is a reason I am so against what I term Box shifters.

Many emails later

We passed emails back and forth until I eventually say down and wrote an email which detailed everything that I had done. What was annoying at one point was enquires asked us had we contacted tech support? Do they not keep records? Remember that margins will be tight on companies like this, so they do not want to be spending a long time on tech support and the like, with cheapness comes a price to be paid as they say. Eventually they agreed to drop the £40 charge to pick up the machine and test it but if they do get it back and it was proven to be working, they would not only charge my sister the £40 but also Labour costs – so now we may have to pay an extra £80 if there tech support fail to find an issue?

One last attempt 

I wanted to make sure before we sent this off that it was 100% not a software or driver issue. We got the machine running and I got in there with TeamViewer. The first thing I did was to find the make and model of the motherboard (ASUS) and get the correct latest Audio Driver. Once the Audio Driver was uninstalled (reboot) and new one put on, I was now at this stage happy that all the drivers were either supplied by Windows or I had the correct one installed for Windows 7 64Bit.

I ran the windows update and did one at a time, rebooted and carried on, of course all this been remotely, this took some time. We had it at the point now were we had a fresh install of Windows 7 64Bit, Office 2007, the Driver + Utility from Kodak for the All-In-One Printer and the relevant drivers and updates.

Event Log

I checked the event Log, this was Full of Kernel Trap Errors, searching on this it said either faulty power supply or do a system check, so off I ran the SFC /now to be 100% sure, this passed fine.

The soak test

She left the computer on from that point forth, nothing running and see if this machine could make it through the night – was it the driver that was at fault or did we have a dud on our hands? I got an email this morning saying it had BSOD once again – same STOP Error as before (0000001A) – case wrapped up as they say and next stage is to send it back.

Conclusion

Any goods you buy, get them out and test them. In this case maybe we should have bought a complete system with OS so that it would have come with a restore CD but looking at this company, they probably would have just supplied a Windows DVD. Was she wrong to pay the extra to get it sooner, would the 15 days they normal take found this issue and saved a lot of time? Paying the extra for the likes of a Dell at least allows you to contact support anytime and not just 9-5 type thing plus they have a simple process of you sticking in the restore DVD, use system and if not working, they arrange collection and a new system quickly.

In this instance, it would have probably been just as easy for me to buy all the parts (same as DinoPC do anyhow), build and test a machine and get the money, at least I would have tested the machine to hell and back. It would have been better if this company just gave my sister her money back and she could start again, this time with Dell for example. Lesson’s learned I hope.