Am I gettin riped off? What would you do? Need Advise.
 

OK

I got my girl friend a laptop for Christmas. It is an older IBM ThinkPad PIII 500 64 Meg of ram. Its ok I got a good deal on it. The main disadvantages are that it has no CD ROM, floppy drive, or operating system installed. So I take it to my local computer store and say I need an OS put on it. The person said it would cost 100 bucks and it would be done before Christmas.

Well they called today and it is finally done 190.00 bucks. Then the dude goes oh yeah the hard drive is making a ton of noise and it will need to be replaced I can do it for another 175.00

I am wondering all you PC techs in the forum; why couldn’t he tell the hard drive was gonna take a dump like 30 minutes into this deal? I just do not get it. Why didn’t he call when I only owed him 31.50 to tell me the hard drive is no good?

So now I have my girl friend all pissed off. Telling me she doesn’t even want the damn thing says it’s a POS and what not.

I am tempted to just leave the damn thing there and let him deal with it. But, When I used to run a shop I had some customers dump their cars on me without paying and I know how much that sucks.

Just wondering what others thoughts are on this.

Thanks,
Kyle 71` 911

First off, I'd say the shop made an error in quoting you and should have called you when their charges exceeded $100 to get your approval to proceed.

Second, the charges could be very valid and warranted if you have a professional shop load an operating system on to an old machine with no CD ROM or floppy. There is the potential to spend 2-3 (or more) hours on a PC like that and if you assume a pro shop charges $60 to $70 an hour, 2-3 hours at rates like that gets you to around $200 if you figure in the cost of the operating system license too.

I would definitely speak with the shop and see if they will still honor their original $100 quote, or at least compromise on the $190 total invoice.

I think the shop should have handled this better. Personally, I would never load an OS on a laptop without a CDROM or floppy. 64MB is really inadequate unles you're going to run some version of Linux. Hard drives can (and do) fail at odd times, usually when they are being "exercised" when loading an OS, etc... Laptops are expensive to repair and replace parts, the hard drives are much more expensive, RAM costs more, etc... Once the OS is loaded how will you keep it updated? Does it have a modem or Ethernet port to connect to the Internet?

$100 for installing the OS is quite fair. I bet the extra was for a Windows license (strange, thinkpads run linux just fine...)

Yeah, but a 90% overage on the bill should have been approved. He quoted $100.00. It's not like there are any "hidden" issues when installing a brand new OS. Pay him the $100, get the original software he loaded (cause you now own it) and find another shop. If he wants the extra $90, I'd make him prove what in his original quote WASN't covered.