No Guarantee

About 18 months ago I bought a refurbished Dell from Gasteiner Technologies which came with their standard one year warranty. Last Friday it died and will no longer power on. I had heard a rumour that under EU rules retailers must always give a 2 year guarantee with substantially expensive/electrical goods. It seems that this is not quite true, but that is because the British Sale of Goods Act meets and exceeds EU law. The SoGA says that an item must last a reasonable length of time. All this left me wondering if standard guarantees/warranties have any point at all? Let alone expensive "extended" warranties.

Usually I would be up for the fight, but I am not really sure that I want to peruse this, I almost accept that I took a risk in buying a refurbished laptop and this time I lost. Having said that they did sell me a laptop for £500 which has broken after 18 months, and that's not really acceptable.

Incidentally I was surprised to find that Dell didn't have one standard price for replacing the motherboard of my laptop. I was originally quoted €400, but when I pointed out I could buy a new laptop for that I was told that I could get a discount, the best deal I was eventually offered was £100 if I bought a three year warranty for £160, which if I was then guaranteed to have a working laptop for three years would have been quite a good deal, if I wasn't so against extended warranties and giving Dell any of my money. I've since been told that buying a laptop from Dell is similar, it's always best to ring them and see what's the best deal you can get from them. The representative also used the rather odd analogy of not being able to take out a warranty on a dead person. After I questioned her on what she'd said she swore that she'd said "insurance", though it still seems a bit of an odd thing to choose to say.

UPDATE: The BBC has a good article on this.

Around The Houses

Back in September I bought my sister an Asus Eee PC for her birthday. It's not the absolute wonder that I was hoping, but she seems happy enough with it, once I'd got the flickr uploader working, which was a pain to add to the launcher, but I digress. The keyboard is now quite properly faulty, the s key and space bar work intermittently and the tab key doesn't work at all, though I am pretty sure she won't have noticed that one :) So I head on over to ebuyer to see about returning it, find their online form and fill it in. After going through the whole process it then gave me a number to call ebuyer on. Fine, I call the number. A guy picks up quite quickly, but informs me that Asus deal with returns direct, so gives me their number. I call them, and navigate their telephone menu. I speak to a woman. She tells me that I will need to fill in their online returns form. I have the Eee on my lap, ready to read the serial number as instructed by the ebuyer guy. I try to type in the address, but unfortunately it has the letter s in it. If you want to return your Eee, save yourself some time and money in 087 numbers by going directly to http://uk.asus.com/rma.