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Thread: click4pc on watchdog....

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    Senior Member j1979's Avatar
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    click4pc on watchdog....

    Just a couple of points, Watchdog may well have a point that the overall business model is suspect. but with the 2 examples, they simply expected the impossible.

    example 1. They send a got a computer technician to go to a fake customers address saying that the computer had stopped working. Watchdog had gone to the hard drive and changed the master / slave jumper. Even if the technician was not dodgy and was a genuine honest tech support guy, how was he supposed to diagnose this?

    If a tech asks the customer, "have you done anything to the PC" and the customer replies "it just stopped working"
    then why would you even look for the slave jumper?

    The second point.

    they said that they broke data protection by only formatting the hard drive and not using techniques to fully erase old data. This is beyond harsh because to be 100% that data can't be recovered, as far as i know you risk damaging the hard drive beyond repair.

    The company in question where dodgy, but Watchdog in my opinion are just as dodgy and mislead the public often, just for shock value it seems.

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    WEEEEEEEEEEEEE! MadduckUK's Avatar
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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    Quote Originally Posted by j1979 View Post
    They send a got a computer technician to go to a fake customers address saying that the computer had stopped working. Watchdog had gone to the hard drive and changed the master / slave jumper. Even if the technician was not dodgy and was a genuine honest tech support guy, how was he supposed to diagnose this?
    Changed jumper, so its an IDE drive.

    computer posts fine, thats good, nothing horrible to trouleshoot

    drive not detected in post? but i can hear it spinning up fine. right so its the board, IDE cable, or hdd then. lets open her up, check everything is pluged in securely and give it another go.

    ok well every things in, but there are two hdds/a hdd and a optical drive on the same cable, and neither of them are showing in BIOS well that is odd, lets try it with just the primary hdd on its own, then the secondary/optical on its own.

    oh, they both work separately? that will be the jumpers then. i had better tell the customer that someone has been inside his computer without their knowledge.




    Seriously, if you cant troubleshoot a HDD jumper you are in the wrong job.
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    The late but legendary peterb - Onward and Upward peterb's Avatar
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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    Plug drive into a linux machine or boot from a live CD/DVD/USB device

    open terminal

    Code:
    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/drive bs=4096
    wait for some time,

    every location on the drive is written with zeros.

    Other secure wipe programs are available to run natively on windows.

    ('every location' with some caveats, re-allocated sectors won't be wiped as they hsve been mapped out of use by the drive, and care must be taken with host protected areas and the like, but to normal users they will be unreachable anyway)
    (\__/)
    (='.'=)
    (")_(")

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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    I hate to say it j1979, but MadduckUK is pretty much spot on with their diagnosis of the problem. I was watching the program last night, and I think it was the first part of the film that they showed us, which was of the "technician" visiting the "fake" address, where it seemed as though the technician was very quick to wrongly diagnose a failed hard disk drive (if I recall correctly, he had pretty much only just walked into the room) !

    Any technician should be able to follow a logical path to troubleshooting a problem, and not just rush in with both feet.

    Any computer repair/sales company should NOT be selling a hard disk drive with someones personal data on it FULL STOP. Personally, if I was replacing a hard disk drive, I would use new ALL THE TIME.

    From the film of the company that we were shown, it certainly appeared to me, that the practices they employed when dealing with their customers were less than great to put it mildly.
    It was interesting when Matt was interviewing the CEO/Director (I forget his name), it definitely appeared that the questions were not being properly answered that most things were just being denied.

    I did think at one point that Matt was actually going to show him the recording of what the Director had actually said. (I did wonder whether the CEO was just sat there in the interview thinking something along the lines of "oops, we've been caught out, lets deny almost everything, and then put things right on the quiet" if you get my meaning.

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    Not a good person scaryjim's Avatar
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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    Quote Originally Posted by j1979 View Post
    If a tech asks the customer, "have you done anything to the PC" and the customer replies "it just stopped working"
    then why would you even look for the slave jumper?
    Quote Originally Posted by MadduckUK View Post
    Seriously, if you cant troubleshoot a HDD jumper you are in the wrong job.
    True, and if the customer says they've done nothing to the computer but you find a changed IDE jumper, then you can immediately call shenanigans, since those things don't change themselves

    Quote Originally Posted by peterb View Post
    Other secure wipe programs are available to run natively on windows.
    True, but I'm pretty sure they won't overwrite the system partition (and if they do Windows will complain bitterly ). Personally I always go for parted magic, which has graphical tools to fire off the various secure delete methods in Linux (including triple random overwrite + zero fill, which is my personal favourite when I've got plenty of time )

  6. #6
    SUMMONER
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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    Reminds me of the Sky investigation a few years back. Why charge a basic call-out/diagnostic fee, when you can charge for (supposedly) repairing something. link

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D515t42ZHjA
    Last edited by SUMMONER; 11-10-2012 at 11:32 AM.

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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    The difference between incompetence and being a complete **** though really.

    Actually having skimmed through the sky article the watchdog one is nothing, hardly worth talking about in comparison.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ephesians
    Do not be drunk with wine, which will ruin you, but be filled with the Spirit
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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    Hence why I just don't watch Watchdog as every time I do I end up screaming at the Telly !

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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    I haven't watched it since the Mondeo replaced the Sierra
    Quote Originally Posted by Ephesians
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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    Your not missing much !

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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    Quote Originally Posted by j1979 View Post
    Just a couple of points, Watchdog may well have a point that the overall business model is suspect. but with the 2 examples, they simply expected the impossible.

    example 1. They send a got a computer technician to go to a fake customers address saying that the computer had stopped working. Watchdog had gone to the hard drive and changed the master / slave jumper. Even if the technician was not dodgy and was a genuine honest tech support guy, how was he supposed to diagnose this?

    If a tech asks the customer, "have you done anything to the PC" and the customer replies "it just stopped working"
    then why would you even look for the slave jumper?
    I thought this too. Also, it's entirely possible that a techie might never have seen an IDE drive. I can't remember the last time I used an IDE HDD drive. Certainly not in the last 6 or 7 years. Also the 'expert' said "That price is outrageous, you can pick up a hard disk for £30 these days."

    Really? An EIDE drive? The cheapest on scan seems to be £50, then you have the cost of installing the drive, the OS, migrating data, and some profit. I don't think it was _that_ outrageous.

    The second point.

    they said that they broke data protection by only formatting the hard drive and not using techniques to fully erase old data. This is beyond harsh because to be 100% that data can't be recovered, as far as i know you risk damaging the hard drive beyond repair.

    The company in question where dodgy, but Watchdog in my opinion are just as dodgy and mislead the public often, just for shock value it seems.
    Moot point. You can do the dd thing as recommended by PeterB, or use something like DBAN, but I would _never_ do a customer repair with 2nd user parts. It sounds like the company were dodgy, and had some dodgy selling practices, but I did think their diagnosis stuff was off the mark a bit. A fairer test would have been to slightly loosen the PATA/power cable.

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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    Quote Originally Posted by b0redom View Post
    Also, it's entirely possible that a techie might never have seen an IDE drive.


    If we are going at it like that then it is entirely possible that a techie might never have seen the insides of a computer before.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ephesians
    Do not be drunk with wine, which will ruin you, but be filled with the Spirit
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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    Quote Originally Posted by MadduckUK View Post
    Changed jumper, so its an IDE drive.

    computer posts fine, thats good, nothing horrible to trouleshoot

    drive not detected in post? but i can hear it spinning up fine. right so its the board, IDE cable, or hdd then. lets open her up, check everything is pluged in securely and give it another go.

    ok well every things in, but there are two hdds/a hdd and a optical drive on the same cable, and neither of them are showing in BIOS well that is odd, lets try it with just the primary hdd on its own, then the secondary/optical on its own.

    oh, they both work separately? that will be the jumpers then. i had better tell the customer that someone has been inside his computer without their knowledge.




    Seriously, if you cant troubleshoot a HDD jumper you are in the wrong job.

    i would have tried to diagnose the same way you state above,

    with 2 hard drives installed, try one as master
    if that works then try the other as master also and then try one as master and one as slave
    this would verify that the hard drives were working,

    you would then check things like jumpers were in right configuration etc,
    pretty simlpe diagnostics really,


    the programme really showed how bad the dompany worked behnd the scenes,
    even without the fake pc issue and fake address
    it showed that all the company were bothered about was making loads of money out of the general public,
    and it looked like loads,
    with NO customer care afterwards,


    Terry

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    Seething Cauldron of Hatred TheAnimus's Avatar
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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    Quote Originally Posted by MadduckUK View Post
    If we are going at it like that then it is entirely possible that a techie might never have seen the insides of a computer before.
    Actually I'm with them on this.

    I bet that the techs they use are paid peanuts, how many monkies have seen oldsk00l ATA?

    I mean, you could easily have 5 years experience, and never seen one. SATA is 10 years old after all.
    throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)

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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    would be a weird thing being a pc techie of 5 years or more and not seeing a ide hard drive !!

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    Re: click4pc on watchdog....

    It would be a weird thing being a pc techie of a month and not seeing an IDE HDD. You would have to put your hands over your eyes and run away screaming whenever a beige box is present.
    Quote Originally Posted by Ephesians
    Do not be drunk with wine, which will ruin you, but be filled with the Spirit
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