Evesham do it again! Oh, and help!!!!!

You may recall my earlier post about Evesham insisting on uplifting my desktop machine to their workshops, despite the fact that I had an on-site warranty.

The machine was collected on November 8, and I received a phone call Friday evening telling me I needed to be in all day today to sign for it. Guess what? It didn't go on the van Friday (is that like Man Friday? ), so now I have to wait in tomorrow as well. Can this company manage anything right?

And now the question

I understand they have replaced mobo, CPU, heatsink, graphics card and memory (uh?). They think they have re-installed Windows and I may have to phone MS and explain the repair to get re-activated. (Doesn't the certainty inspire you with confidence?)

As far as I can work out, that completely eliminates me being able to use my Acronis backups to restore the machine, unless anyone can tell me better. Any advice gratefully received, I'm sure it will help my blood pressure.

Thanks.

If they replaced the components with like for like then the Acronis backups could well be good with the exception that Windows would probably need reactivating still. You could try installing Acronis on the returned machine (provided they HAVE reinstalled Windows) and making an image of it and then try your previous backups. At least you can return to the mess/not mess/we are not sure that Evesham supplied.

Pardon my french but oh FFS!

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I understand they have replaced mobo, CPU, heatsink, graphics card and memory

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Why did they stop there and not just replace the whole PC with a new one?!

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They think they have re-installed Windows

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They think they've re-installed Windows? You mean they're not sure? How can they not know whether they have or not.....and if Windows isn't re-installed, how do they know for sure that the PC is running properly (yes, I realise that they could have run diagnostics and that Windows isn't the only OS that'll run on a PC yada yada)???

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that completely eliminates me being able to use my Acronis backups to restore the machine

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I'm not sure.....probably rules out restoring the main system partition as drivers etc. will have changed, but any partitions with data only should be ok. At worst I would expect that you would have to re-install your applications etc. and could then mount the Acronis images as virtual disks to bring back individual files or folders. Difficult to say without knowing how the storage was carved up in the first place.

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Pardon my french but oh FFS!

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That's approximately what I said in an email to the MD last night, though I expect I will be told I was 'unfortunate', just as they kept saying when my laptop went through a mobo a year (curiously, Mitac, whose chassis it was and who serviced it, could manage to replace that without messing with my Windows...).

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Why did they stop there and not just replace the whole PC with a new one?!

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It would have cost them a couple of HDs and a couple of DVD drives extra, plus a case? OTOH, I should imagine they would have saved on labour.

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They think they've re-installed Windows? You mean they're not sure? How can they not know whether they have or not.....and if Windows isn't re-installed, how do they know for sure that the PC is running properly (yes, I realise that they could have run diagnostics and that Windows isn't the only OS that'll run on a PC yada yada)???

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That was my reaction, but the TS guy didn't know. Their systems are a mess and he wasn't very interested.

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At worst I would expect that you would have to re-install your applications etc. and could then mount the Acronis images as virtual disks to bring back individual files or folders. Difficult to say without knowing how the storage was carved up in the first place.

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That was about my expectation. Which, with all the software, printers, security and customising of menus, is about three days work by my reckoning (once I dig out all the tweaks...). I partition C (System), D (Apps), E(Data). so I can re-install data very easily (although I have a gut feeling that I'll have to re-partition too), but will have to do the apps the hard way, then over-write to re-instate settings, templates etc. Then I'll manually pick the menus out from an image of the old C, and somewhere along the way, use the Files and Settings Transfer wizard to do the rest. Joy!

Thanks for your response, it's nice to know I'm not the only one to feel this is a complete farce.

Thanks for that. As I understand it, they haven't replaced like for like, so the drivers are key. I'll see what comes out of the box before deciding whether it's worth a try at a system restore (Acronis, not Windows), but I suspect that it will not be.

Edited by deleted (Tue 21-Nov-06 08:55:38)

Is this a farce or what?

The machine spec included 8 USB ports, all working when it left here. It came back with 6! Not impressed. I've connected an extra two from a spare header on the mobo to a backplate socket strip, if you know what I mean.

Not only that, but it had a RAID0, 2 x 200GB drives, it came back with 1 drive. Somehow, they'd killed the RAID when re-installing, but not taken the partition off the dis, so it didn't show as present. To say that I'm not amused would be to put it mildly! Now cured, it's actually as I ordered it originally, 2 x 200GB drives.

They've given me a Foxconn mobo, with all bells and whistles, including two gigabit ethernet ports (anyone got any ideas what I could use the second one for?), 8 USB and 2 Firewire, so that's an improvement. The graphics card has gone from being a 128MB ATI Radeon AGP to a 256MB ATI Radeon PCI-X. The memory speed is higher, 400 -> 533 MHz (? memory failing - mine! ).

They did manage to screw up and only install six of the USB ports, I brought the remaining pair out to the rear with a blanking plate replacement. They also decided to re-install Windows on one of the 2 x 200GB HDs, which had previously been configured as RAID0 (not what I ordered, but they were adamant at the time that they had to configure a pair of drives as a RAID). Unfortunately, they forgot to clear the other drive, so it wasn't available to the system until I went into disk management and reset the partition.

Nice that they effectively gave me a better machine, shame that they didn't quite do it well.

Edit: Oh, and the CPU temperature, which was reaching 80C at 50% load now no longer gets above 33C!

Edited by deleted (Wed 22-Nov-06 10:30:31)

As long as it works I guess....but it's been a long journey for you I know. Glad you got it sorted (sort of!).

Thanks, Mike. It has been a long battle to get them to do the right thing - now I'm busy battling all the software and settings back on to the machine. A few days of work I think.

I will not touch Evesham agaihn. A few years back before they got so well known, I got a external harddrive for my Amiga 500 from them. this hard drive also had memory inside.
Well it went wrong and I sent it back, they returned it but with only half the memory. They said they had no record of how much memory was in there. I was not happy and vowed never to use them again.

I know of someone else who had a computer from them and is more or less having the same problems that you are, 4 times his computer have been back to them. He is now taking it to the small claims court.

Well, at the moment, they do seem to have done what they should have for me, basically the machine has been rebuilt and is now a higher spec than when I bought it. That said, the fight to get there and the inconvenience they have caused me make me very wary of buying from them again. It's a shame, they once were a good company.