Friday, October 27, 2006

Evesham Technology UK Suck

So...why do Evesham Technology suck ?

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About 10 weeks ago I purchased an expensive desktop replacement laptop from Evesham. Total price came to just shy of £1500 a not inconsiderable sum for a PC nevermind a laptop but I liked the review, respected PCPro's views on the machine and went ahead.

My new machine arrived, I plugged it in to charge and left for the requisite period. The first thing I did was install my (current) favourite game (BF2) to see how it looked on this all-singing, all-dancing monster of a machine ! Installed it, patched, started it up...poof ! Crash To Desktop (CTD). Now these are notoriously difficult to diagnose but with a bit of effort I got there, informed EAGames (makers of BF2) who valiantly tried to help me get it running - no joy. Their final suggestion - contact the laptop integrators and see if there's anything they can do ?

Scroll rapidly forward to today and I've got my laptop back from Evesham following it's second RMA and I still cannot play my preferred games on it. We are however a little clearer on exactly what the relationship between and organisation like Evesham and the paying customer is...they do not give a stuff about you once they've got your cash !

I've been informed that Evesham has a "limited responsibility for software compatibility" with their machines...I can accept that statement but it would have been nice to have a) known that before I coughed up nearly £1.5k for a machine I can't play my games on b) known what else they think/know their machines have 'ahem' compatibility issues with.

In addition to this I've now no way of knowing, what the machine will be capable of running. I just bought my wife Sims 2...will this work on their laptop and if I call tech support/customer service to point out this failing I'm just going to get the same 'get out' clause.

I've asked on at least two calls with customer service for them swap out my machine for something with a better 'compatibility' rating ie not a dual mobile SLI-enabled graphics sub-system but they have stubbornly refused stating again and again there's nothing wrong with the laptop. I've acknowledged their machine works ok...I've just made a mistake buying something that's so bleeding-edge. I would happily forego some of the graphics processing grunt for a laptop that at least plays the majority of my preferred games ? What the hell happened to Customer service ?

Shame on you Evesham...your complete lack of any post-sale Customer care and interest in getting me a machine that fulfills my requirements means this blog has had to be started - as much as catharsis for me as to document the problem.