Thursday, August 30, 2007

Are Repairtech any good?

In case anyone is unsure who Repairtech are, they are a computer repair company that are unable to correctly repair computers. Their registered business name is A1 Technologies, and let me tell you, there is nothing A1 about them.

I sent a Dell laptop to them for repair. The problem was that the laptop could no longer charge the battery. The battery could be charged if inserted into another Dell laptop indicating that it was not the battery. The same charger was also used indicating that it was not the charger. This Dell laptop was out of warranty and Dell quoted approximately €1,000 (euro) for the repair with the majority of this cost covering the labour. Repairtech quoted €100 for the repair. I thought it sounded like a good deal until the technician returned the laptop to me in a worse condition than when he had collected it! The laptop was able to charge the battery once again, but he had created a user account that had replaced the existing user profile and this could not be restored. The hard drive then became corrupted. These problems could easily have been avoided if the technician had possessed the necessary skills to correctly repair the computer.

I will certainly look more carefully in future when choosing a computer repair company and I would highly recommend that people avoid Repairtech aka A1 Technologies unless they don't particularly like their computer.

When I could not access the user profile, the technician mentioned they had a tool that could recover it but that it would cost another couple of hundred euro. I wasn't prepared to pay this as it was quite clear the technician had been the cause of the problems that now existed on the computer. It may have been a money making scam by Repairtech to fix one problem and deliberately cause another or it may have been purely down to incompetence on the part of the technician.

If you hear Repairtech advertising on the radio that they can repair your computer, forget you ever heard the advertisement. They cannot repair your computer. I feel that the Repairtech technicians are about as experienced in computers as the many 'technical' support teams that are in operation today. These 'technical' support teams as everyone knows are largely, if not completely, outsourced. They include people who have never seen a computer and have been provided with extremely poor training. I know this for a fact, I worked briefly for one particular company that had taken on another companys technical support. I am technical myself, but some of my colleagues struggled with the most basic of computer tasks. These people were supposed to be the experts and they demonstrated no prior knowledge or experience with computers. The training lasted approximately two weeks and comprised of some poorly presented PowerPoint slideshows and basic multiple choice open book tests.

The similarities between my techno-phobe colleagues and the Repairtech technician were uncanny!

Please avoid Repairtech / A1 Technologies for your own sake and for the sake of your computer. There are better options available. Repairtech are a waste of time and money.

Be cautious when choosing a computer repair company.

All the best,

Peter

1 comment: