Small Business Idea

[Stringent]

I have stopped building PC's as well for people. If people come to me and say can you build me a PC, I say no go to Dell and get one. Why because they can deal with all the support. I don't mind helping out with odd problems, or doing a reformat and installation, and they make sure that if anything else goes wrong then its chargeable time, because its working when it leaves me.

[Zadock]

Oh me either.

I have an amusing story about a luddite. My Dad and I knocked together a cheap one for one of my Dad's mates (my dad is an IT consultant, Unisys Mainframe proper oldskool!) and he was happy with it for a while and then he filled it up with crap (spyware, useless software for this and that) and then started complaining about how it was so crap but rather than reformating he went and bought a new one saying how much better it was and that somehow the one we built was inferior... 6 months later he's buying another for the same reason... muppet. He wouldn't have it that a simple bit of maintainance would sort it out, just looked at us like we were telling him a big load of porkies.

[Zero 101]

I have stopped building PC's as well for people. If people come to me and say can you build me a PC, I say no go to Dell and get one. Why because they can deal with all the support. I don't mind helping out with odd problems, or doing a reformat and installation, and they make sure that if anything else goes wrong then its chargeable time, because its working when it leaves me.

Yes another vote for Dell, let someone else pull their hair out.

[santa claus]

Yes another vote for Dell, let someone else pull their hair out.

What about Mesh? Why did Mesh and Hexus part company a little while back?

[CaptainCrash]

I don't know anything about Hexus's relationship past or present with Mesh, but I can say on the one occasion I had dealings with them, their after-sales support was absolutely pitiful. Emails ignored, phone calls ignored, letters ignored, you name it, they ignored it. IIRC they were featured on Watchdog, although this was a couple of years ago and I've no idea what they're like these days.

To cut a long story short, I'd recommended one of their systems to a friend, based purely on the advertised specs and the price (live and learn), and it kept freezing and BSODing seemingly for no logical reason - in the absence of any help from Mesh I felt responsible to a degree, having recommended it in the first place. I faffed around with it endlessly, thinking time and time again that *this* time I'd found what was wrong and fixed it, only to get the inevitable mournful phone call ("It's doing it again..."), usually in the evening when I was watching "Spooks" on TV. I ended up completely rebuilding it from scratch around a new motherboard (which sorted it once and for all), simply because I was sick of the sight of the damned thing. If it had belonged to someone off the street who was paying me as a freelance consultant, it would have been a complete nightmare...

[Zadock]

Mesh can be dodgy I agree. A friend of mine has a Mesh PC, its a few years old now and the warranty has ended but it wasn't the customer service that the problem was with so much what the engineers did and we didn't discover this until a few days ago.

About 2 years ago the graphics card, an ATI Radeon 9800pro, failed so he sent it back to mesh. It came back about a month later with a replacement card. Unlike I would he didn't check the card in anyway to see what they had replaced it with. A few days ago he was having problems with it so I got him to download the ati tool... which promptly identified it as a 9800SE (s**t edition). A little cheeky if you ask me!