No apologies necessary at all :3 It was really encouraging to read! And I have a tendency to get rambly myself anyhow, haha.
The silly thing about their warranty in particular is, it comes as standard with the product. You can pay for an extended one, but every purchase has 1 year collect & return for repairs/faults, etc. And something like 3 years tech support.
But yeah, the first one they sent was dead on arrival, so that went straight back no questions cos I sent em a video of the horrific sound it made when powered on! I think it was a fan scraping on something, but I couldn’t see anything obvious, and I wouldn’t dare to try and tamper with it myself to resolve it anyhow.
They took that one back without question and completely rebuilt it from scratch. I swear this random bracket in the 2nd build is sitting in a way that it doesn’t support the graphics card though, it’s very weirdly positioned like it’s just floating and not doing anything!
After agreeing to allow them to perform the remote support session (which took around 3 hours >.<) the support guy, while lovely, wasn’t able to fix the BSODs. He said it seemed like the OS is screwed and needed a clean install, but also had concerns about the CPU & RAM.
He asked me how I wanted to proceed, so I straight up repeated wanting a refund, politely explaining again that this is the 2nd build, so it shouldn’t be unreasonable to want my money back rather than sending it back to then receive a 3rd potentially faulty one.
The guy was really helpful, went to speak to his manager, and they said it could be returned for a refund. They sorted that out pretty sharpish too! The courier came to pick it up earlier today.
I made sure to take a mixture of photos and videos of it being safely packed and sealed up because I’m kinda paranoid they might try to pin something on me and say it was damaged in transit due to poor packing or something like that. It just wouldn’t surprise me if they try to find a way to reduce the refund amount >.<
So yeah, progress has been made at least I guess :3 Now I just have to wait cos they said that they can’t process the refund until a technician has looked at the machine.
The really annoying thing is, while it’s great that they’ve finally agreed to refund me, it doesn’t change the fact that I’ll still be without a computer for heck knows how long :(
I spent hours researching other companies and reading reviews, and it seems like no matter where you buy from, people are leaving 1-star reviews about faulty PCs where customer support ignores them completely.
My experience with the company I bought from may have been a bitter one so far, but I guess at least they do respond to stuff >.< I’m kinda worried about attempting to order elsewhere because the place I ordered from had the highest TrustPilot score. I dunno whether I should give them 1 final chance provided they do refund me. Maybe see if they can build something with similar specs but use completely different components or something.
Thank you again for your advice & encouragement :3