ANyone every bought Comp USA computer with their TAP warranty

[D Hanson]

I usually never go for the warranties these electronics stores always try and sell you. I though what the heck for my last computer.

I have had a slew of problems with the computer and keep getting charged for their efforts to fix. They always seem to find a way to get around the warranty.

When they give the sales pitch about the warranty, they always make it sound like everything is covered and even told me that they will come to your home to fix it which was attractive to me. Last time the mother board flaked out, they made me spend literally hours on the phone with support before they would even consider sending someone out. Total waste of time and I ended up having to take it directly to Comp USA in the end anyway. So much for onsite repairs.

Two more problems in the last week and dropped $ 175 for service charges and $ 399 for a new video card a couple of days ago. Still having problems and now they tell me that it will cost $ 100 to back up a few picture of may car to CD saved under 1 directory and that they will charge me $ 125 an hour.

The sum total of this is that I can buy an entire new CPU box cheaper than what the charges I am incurring and about to incur to try and get my computer fixed under warranty. I think I paid about $ 400 for the warranty on just the computer and also paid like a $ 100 for the LCD monitor to be covered. What a waste of time and money.

[lendaddy]

Whenever the "hey mister.." sales boys approach me with those warrantees I just laugh. They usually smile a knowing "well I have to try to hump ya" smile and that's it. Some are so persistant I have to kill them and bury them in the median. Wait did I just...

[rcecale]

I do computer work for a living and make it a point to steer people clear of places like CompUSA, Best Buy, etc. And your situation is exactly why. It seems like everything is so overpriced and they are such a big company that they can't justify doing "little" jobs without charging the company rate.

Depending on the size of the files you want to back up, you may be better served buying a Thumb Drive from an Office Depot, or Staples and saving your files to that.

For that matter, if you want, you can e-mail the files to me and I'll put them on CD for you. PM me if you'd like to try that. I'm just north of Atlanta so it wouldn't take too long through the mail.

Randy

[D Hanson]

There are only like 30 pictures of my cars that are no longer on my camera that I wanted to keep. I have a CD burner. My computer is already back at Comp USA yet again and he wanted to charge me $ 100 just do copy the pictures to a CD Rom.

Normally, I would not except anything for free, but I am literally paying more for computer work out of my pocket than the CPU is worth and I purchased a warranty for about a 1/3 of the price of the computer to avoid this. I also purchased the warranty because I was told they would come to my home to fix it which has never happened.

The GREAT part is that 3 employees told me that they had seen people like me before getting screwed and a manager type of person told me she was sick of it and would help me out if I filed a lawsuit. She said she was getting tired of some of their practices that were misleading and etc.

[on-ramp]

learn to build your own computer, it's much cheaper and you get want you want, not what's pre-bundled on PCs you find at Bestbuy or CompUsa.


it's really not that difficult to learn.

[rcecale]

Plus, there are many web-based forums like Pelican that cater to the DIY Computer Person. Building them yourself is definitely the way to go!

Randy

[jrdavid68]

Here's a good "Pelican like" site to visit for PC DIYers:

http://www.techsupportguy.org

[john70t]

I try and avoid the companys for good(!) that use systematic unethical buisness pratices.. that "once bitten, twice shy" thing.
They do charge a 15% restocking fee on returned items. Sounds like b.s. to me.

[D Hanson]

I used to build my own and would use only the best motherboards, controllers cards, video cards and etc. Back when 386s were in and 486s were just coming out, I would pay 2X the cost of normal ram to get like 60 nanosecond RAM back then instead of 70 or 80 nanosecond RAM. In fact the CPU I am using right now is an old 450 AMD that is overclocked with an overclocked video card. Funny thing is that this computer is stressed to max and running beyond mfg. specs and has done so for years and is more reliable than the HP I purchased.

I bought an HP because it was easy, quick, and somewhat cheap ($3,200.00), but I knew better than to buy something proprietary. Unfortunately, I just don't have the time anymore to mess around with computers and I am not into gaming like I used to be.