He took the laptop to them to be fixed which is when they asked for the drivers cd. He left the laptop with them and was returning with the drivers cd a few days later which is when I told him not to as they were going to charge him £150.00 which is ridiculous considering a HDD is approx £50.00 and doesn't take long at all to replace.
I'll go with him and double check the signed agreement. I was just wondering if they can actually get away with this if they had already implied to him that they were waiting for the cd's before they'd do anything. Would they not need to advise him of the diagnotic charge before hand?
I know what these little computer stores are like over charging people. I worked in one for a short period and the store would charge £30 to scan a photo into a word document, and £70 for a virus scan. The store would get away with it as well because some people don't have a clue, which is wrong.
you're being entirely unreasonable here.
£150 sounds a perfectly reasonable ammount for me when considering the time required to swap the drive, and to re-image the machine.
At the end of the day, its a business, and they have to make money otherwise there would be no point in existing.
Yes you can do it for £50 and some beer tokens, but thats mates rates. Business' cannot charge these.
THe reason he's being charged is simple - he's wasted their time. He's asked the shop to fix something, then turned round and changed his mind and going somewhere else cheaper - ie you.
Just pay up, its the least you can do for wasting their time.
If a customer specifically instructs only for their HD to be replaced then there is no need for any diagnostics to take place, the scope of the work is to simply put a new HD in.
If any extra work was done that was not origionally agreed then the customer is well within their rights not to pay for that work. That is of course dependant on what the T&C's he signed upto state.
If the customer asks for the computer to be fixed then that is when the scope of the work is quite broad and diagnostic tests would need to be done to discover the fault. In this case he is liable for the testing and would have agreed to it when he signed the T&C's.
Only the ops friend will know exactly what instructions were given
Agreed.
If the person in question took it to the shop in the first place rather than doing it himself i'm guessing he's not a techy.
Its therefore entirely likely he came into the shop and made mumblings about it "probably needing a new hard drive" and asking them to "have a look at it"
I very much doubt specific instructions were given to replace the HD and nothing else. For goodness sake replacing a hard drive on a laptop involves removing 5 screws and sliding the thing out and back in again. Lego is more complex.
If he doesnt feel confident enough to do this (which is fine, plenty of people are reluctant to mess around with technology which is why shops of this type exist) then he won't have been confident enough to make a concrete diagnosis himself and given specific instructions.
