I am not looking down upon you. I am a fairly penniless freelancer
myself, as my business has suffered dramatically from the credit
crunch.
But what I am trying to point out to you is that you are acting in an
irrational and unfair fashion. The company is trying to help you, but
you are not playing by their rules. Neither I nor Packard-Bell is
victimising you, but if you want their help, you have to meet them in
the middle.
As an example - I can't afford new hardware either. I have not had a
new machine since 2001. My current machine is a Core 2 Quad Extreme
running at 3GHz with 8GB of RAM. I got it on my local Freegle group.
It cost me £3.80 - the cost of a return rail fare from Wimbledon to
Stoneleigh. I cycled to and from the station. I transplanted into it
the graphics card and hard disks from my old machine, which was a free
cast-off from a friend, as was the one before that.
(OK, true, I did soon after have to replace the hard disks when they
failed. That cost me £43 for a terabyte drive.)
If you need to back up your stuff, there are ways to do that. You
could use Google Drive, or Dropbox, or Ubuntu One, or all of them. You
could burn it onto DVDs, which are very cheap now - you can buy
hundreds of gigs for the cost of a small cheap meal. £3 will buy you a
USB to SATA cable, and then you could collect some old disks from
Freegle or the like and backup your stuff on to them.
Presumably you have not generated all this data from scratch since you
got the laptop. Do you still have the old computer? Use its hard
disk(s) for backups using the above-mentioned external-drive cable.
But refusing to send the machine in its entirety, and refusing to
phone the supplier, and then complaining that they are not helping
you, is grossly unfair and unreasonable. You want them to help you.
Well, play the game, cooperate with them, or they can't, and they are
not to blame.
You seem to be missing the point. Firstly my old machine is no more and
if I backup to DVDs or split my system into umpteen small drives how
exactly do I run my business while my machine is away? I can't do an
online backup as I'm on mobile broadband and the data allowances are
pitiful. I require access to the contents of my drive in a rational
fashion on a day to day basis. As it stands it will just be plugged into
an old desktop and will serve to cover the essentials until my laptop
returns.
My issue isn't with them requiring the hard disk, indeed they have
agreed that it will be accepted without. My issue is that as as user of
PAYG mobile I can call mobiles and geographic landlines. Packard Bell
have made themselves unreachable by someone in my position, as have many
businesses. My issue is that it should not take a month of email ping
pong to arrange something as simple as a warranty return.
I also have issue with the build quality. This machine comes with 4gb
RAM and a 500gb HDD, my old Dell only came with 60Gb HDD yet still
outperformed this machine on day to day tasks. It seems almost as if
there is a large bottleneck in the system, that it has the power but is
unwilling to use it. Had I been given the choice of machine this one
certainly would not have been anywhere near the front of my list.
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