Thursday, May 25, 2006

Two fingers to PC World

Before I go into the rest of it, what's the difference in buying from a superstore and a local shop? The superstore has choice and the shop has service. The totally useless prats at PC World Staples Corner first made me queue up at returns as the nice but silly woman on the checkout told me my new dvd burner was external, and as soon as I got in the car it said in tiny letters 'internal'. Eventually the staff behind the returns desk drew a straw to decide to serve me, and I had to swap the burner and dedicated blank dvds. The shelves had nothing on them to indicate what each item was, and 'external' and 'internal' were either in a tiny word on the bottom of the box or not mentioned at all. The external one I did find cost nearly double the others, and as soon as I got home and hooked all the usual shit up (it needs a mains lead which crosses half the room) I burned the first load of pictures and when I put the dvd in the drive said 'no disk'.

What's the difference between a working dvd system and another long visit to PC World returns? A 'W'. Yes, everything between success and total failure rested on a letter W. The trouble is the totally useless spastic at the returns desk was supposedly qualified to sell computers and I wasn't qualified to buy them. So though the woman at sales correctly identified the Philips unit that had to go back needed special dvds, but not whether the unit was internal or external, the twat at returns was totally happy to sell me the pack of blank dvds I picked, though mine had a W on them. To my burner this was like putting a pig's penis in a Jewish bride. It reacted with such venom my computer restarted three times over and the fourth attempt with a different software finally posted an error message 'wrong dvd'. It didn't say what was wrong with it except the box said R and the dvd said RW.

Part two coming. Will PC World accept the 10 useless dvd RWs back as I've opened them, considering they should have known they didn't go with the burner. It's not the £10, I can absorb that, but the sheer pointless waste of time having to spend another trip queuing up to get it back and still can't use my burner till it's sorted out. If anyone wanted to buy them I'd just get the right ones, but what are the chances of anyone needing to burn 10 movies in a format clearly no one else wants?

1 comment:

Sharon Schoepe said...

I would pick a local shop anytime. The only good things about superstores are the prices and selection. The staff on the other hand usually can't tell the difference between their ass and a hole in the ground.

That being said....make sure that you look to see if your burner uses dvd+r or dvd-r. The rw means that it is rewriteable and you can use it more than once. I usually don't bother with rw myself. If I am going to the trouble of burning them on dvd then usually I would want a permanent copy.