RMA woes at eBuyer

Hi Mike

Thought you might be interested in this! Sorry it's long, but I can't do justice to this in a quick paragraph...

I'm currently in the midst of what is becoming an amusing tale of dire customer service. I discovered eBuyer a few months back, and was initially impressed by their low prices and what seemed pretty efficient service. I recently bought a stack of bits to build PCs for a couple of mates, and one of the graphics cards was duff. Due to a delay on another component (no fault of eBuyer, this) I was already behind schedule and was quite keen to get this resolved quickly, to prevent my "favour for friend" turning into a "wish I'd bought it from a shop" scenario. So, first thing Monday morning I checked out their returns procedure and requested an RMA. (First shock - you're expected to pay for the postage on returns yourself, which seems to be rubbing salt into the wound somewhat.) I selected "direct replacement", as that was what I wanted. By the next day it became clear that they were not especially keen to acknowledge my RMA request, so I thought I'd best order a replacement and just swallow the extra delivery costs - not the end of the world, and I found some other bits to order so it didn't seem so bad. They don't do email, and it turns out that their customer support phone line is constantly engaged or out of action, so I posted an "eNote" (this mechanism is there "in order to serve you better") to let them know what I had done - I didn't want to end up with two cards, and there was no way of editing my RMA request.

That evening, I checked on my order's progress to find that it was marked Payment Error. I'd goofed up here - my credit card had just recently been re-issued, and the details eBuyer had still had the old expiry date. No problem, I thought - I'll just put in the correct new date and it will go through. Except it didn't. Next day I checked to find the large, red Payment Error notice still there large as life. I tried again to fix the details, but by now the website had decided to deny all attempts to alter anything. I tried the customer support line again - still engaged. Running out of alternatives at this point, I added an eNote to my eNote (you can't have more than one open, but there seems no limit to how many times you can append it, which has proved useful), and pleaded for some contact. I had no idea what was going on!

Thursday morning brought a little ray of light - I'd been granted an RMA number after only three days! Still no replies to my eNotes though. I thought I'd add another appendage to express my dissatisfaction, and re-state my desire to buy some stuff from them if only they'd let me. That afternoon, I thought I'd give the phone support another whirl - maybe they were just really busy? I called every five minutes for about half an hour, and then, shock, horror, I got a ringing tone! I waited with baited breath, and thrilled to the recorded message assuring me of the importance of my call. I only had to hold for about another 20 minutes before I got to speak to a real-live human! The person in question was actually really helpful, so no problems there - I explained the problem with my credit card, and she tried to put the order through again for me. No luck - stopped by the bank! I reluctantly hung up, and called my bank (Smile, an internet-based business who presumably also would rather not use the phone lines - through in less than a minute). Again, I have to admit I'd screwed up - the card hadn't been activated, a security measure I'd completely forgotten, but that was fixed over the phone immediately. Now the problem was how to communicate this happy news to eBuyer. Tried the phone - engaged. I resumed my every-few-minutes attempts for the remaining hour of the business day (apologies to my employers), but was not able to achieve a ringing tone. "I know", I thought, "I'll send them an eNote!" After all, they "ensure you receive a speedy and effective response to your query"...

An hour and forty minutes after explaining what had occurred, and that my card was now activated and ready to go, I got an automatic email telling me that my order had been cancelled. Nice.

I added another eNote appendage (I was getting into this now), expressing my anger, disbelief, etc. and challenging them to respond with some kind of explanation and apology. I expected to get the usual half-hearted "Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused" reply, but I'm an optimist.

You can tell that by the fact I even expected to get a reply.

As of now, it's been 73 hours since I first logged a query with their "speedy and effective" service, and I've not heard a peep. I accept that I caused some of the problem (but not the flaky graphics card which started all this), but it's a problem that could've been rectified in ten minutes given any sensible level of service. I've moved out of the anger stage now, and am starting to see the funny side, so I'm thinking that we should keep a log, maybe take some friendly wagers, and see how long it takes for them to reply. I've saved my log of eNotes to a Word document in case they delete it, so if you're interested I can forward it to you.

Keep up the good work on the site,

Joe

Cue, Circuit City

First, I'd like to say that I love your site. I check it daily (almost hourly actually). Keep up the great work!

I'm having a bit of a problem with Circuit City (US) and I hope you can help.

Back in December Circuit City offered a re-bagged Western Digital 120gb, 8mg cache HD for $20USD after mail in rebates ($139.99 - $40 - $40 - $40 = 19.99). I was one of hundreds, probably thousands that purchased this drive on 12/12/03 across the US believing that three $40 rebates would be honored. At the register only two rebates printed and the sales associate instructed me to call the rebate center for the third. On the same day, after realizing that they had mistakenly overlapped rebates for this item, CC decided to change the valid rebate dates from the original 12/10/03 through 12/24/03 to 12/10/03 and 12/11/03 only for rebate# YB273. After two calls to confirm that they would still honor the rebates, I decided to keep the drive (as did many others. See here). I was even given a mailing address (Program YB273. PO BOX 3650. Young America, MN 55558-3650) and instructions submit the rebate. I was told by a Circuit City Rebate Center rep Named Carrie (ID# 2243) that they were aware of the confusion and the PO BOX had been assigned to handle this specific rebate#. The following week Circuit City posted the missing rebate on their website. I registered and print the needed forms and promptly mailed all three rebates.

Fast forward to last week. I received two letters from Circuit City each rejecting a different rebate (one for being purchased AFTER the rebate expired and one that was submitted online but the corresponding forms were not received via mail) and ONE $40 rebate check!

After one call to the rebate center and two to the corporate office the rebate that was "not received via US Mail" will now be on its way in 4 to 8 weeks. I was informed that the "expired" $40 rebate that never printed (but was being honored) was in fact NOT going to be honored. I was also informed that the reason I was told in December that the rebate would be honored was because the customer service representatives at the rebate center were originally instructed by management to do so. He said that their was much confusion about this until some time later when Circuit City's corporate office sent an email to its employees informing that they in fact will NOT honor this rebate.

So now I'm (and many others) stuck with a hard drive that costs much more than I was led to believe. Circuit City has a 14 day return policy so it can not be returned. This hard drive is installed on the same computer that I'm writing this email on anyhow. I doubt they would allow installed hardware to be returned. Reinstalling Windows, drivers, apps, games, IE favorites, tweaks, and transferring a 45gb file archive to another hard drive hardly seems worth $40. I have been a Circuit City customer of nine years spending literally thousands of dollars there, and as you can imagine, they won't see another red cent from me unless they decide to do something about this.

Please inform your readers (or post this email) of Circuit City's business and PR practices as I'm sure they'd like to know.

I'm sure I'm not the only reader that has been affected by Circuit City's mess. If enough people speak up maybe something will be done about this problem.

Name supplied

Abit of a Problem? Abit says NotAbit

Joshua,

After ABIT of thought, I think we can come up with a solution for you. Honestly, we have not heard of this problem through media reviews nor forums nor e-mails. We certainly put our boards through the ringer before they are sent to market. A link to the test report for the KV8-MAX3 shows 41 different memory types that have gone through testing with the KV8-MAX3 and passed.

Here.

It is true that ABIT is ABIT more aggressive in our settings than most motherboard makers. However, less than a 2% difference deviation from exact core clock is well within accepted AMD Engineering specs and should not cause any difficulties for a CPU or memory. As for the clock mismatch between BIOS setting and real clock, there should not be such a difference. We will look at your issues and have you work directly with our tech support and they will help you solve this. If this means a new BIOS update, it shall be done. Both the Head of our Customer Service Team as well as the Head of our Tech Support Team is included in this mail. Any issues which the ABIT Tech Team work on, they ensure all have access through the www.ABIT.com.tw website.

Next time you have an issue, contact our tech team (technical@abit.com.tw) directly. They are friendly guys and they enjoy this kind of thing.

Best regards

Scott Thirlwell
Marketing Director, ABIT

Prescott Temperature Rising

The Chipster is a little optimistic about this. If we look at HardOCP or Lost Circuits, the temperature is a little intimidating! Despite its resurgence, anyone who worked with water cooling in the 1970s does NOT want to be inflicted with it again, especially in an office or commercial context. Also, consider a fairly typical commercial rack, in which people expect to be able to fit 64 Xeon CPUs. Well, Prescott doesn't take MUCH more power, but its increased temperature means that any cooling problems will be serious, fast. And such problems are a major cause of failure and down time.

However, that is at its current clock rate. In my view, the key to Prescott's success will be whether Intel can ramp up its clock rate while keeping its power consumption and temperature under control. If this isn't possible and, worse, if the problems get worse in 65 nm, there is very likely to be a reaction against it by the commercial sector. Intel could well respond by SSE-3 enabling Dothan, which could well kill the Prescott line in short order.

Name supplied

Mission Chips

In the article "Moon Mission" you wrote:

"Can there now be any doubt whatever that if the position of King of Spain was one that was open to election, Carly would beat the current holder of the title hands down?"

Refers to what exactly, some obscure English proverb?

For what it's worth the actual King of Spain was a pretty popular guy when last I visted that country. Playing a decisive role in putting down the attempted 1981 coup was pretty good PR for el Rey. Carly, on the other hand, is best known for enriching herself by screwing over HP's employees and then flaunting it by flying around in gulfstream jets. Her managerial policies would not endear her to los obereros. Carly as royalty - one can only shudder at the possibilities.

IMHO Carly wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of replacing Juan Carlos in a fair election.

Regards

David Mathog

Dido, Dido, it's off to work we go

The Dido album has protection using Copy Control technology, which is easy to get around.

When you put the CD in your drive first, it will say that you have to install software to play it if you have Autorun enabled. It's this software that knocks our Media Player.

If you say no, and then run Windows Media Player, it will play/rip/copy with no problem using Microsoft's own technology.

I hate to think what Arista paid for this amateur rubbish.

I'm not even a hacker, I accidentally discovered this when I wanted to copy the Dido album to my MP3 player and I had autorun off by default. I never knew it was protected until I noticed the Copy Control logo a few weeks later.

Jonathan

Dido, Dido, Dido, Dido

Dear Sir/Madam

Actually, it doesn't. It wants to install its own player software, presumably to make it more difficult for all you nasty pirates out there to "rip" the "tracks" to "MP3", as I believe the vernacular would have it. It is not, however, the first CD to do this, and it is quite happy to play in Media Player in XP at any rate without installing anything.

Yours, "down" with the "kids",

Paul McCooe

Virtual PC 2004 and AMD

Dear TheInquirer,

Had you ran Virtual PC 2004 on a fast AMD Althon XP machine you would have discovered something interesting!

Microsoft has done its usual impressive job of turning gold into lead. You see, it doesn't run reliably on fast AMD Athon XP processors! Curiously, the previous Connectix product, Virtual PC 5.2, works very well on AMD Athlon XP processors - so far 10 months of solid work on an AMD XP 2800+ processor based machine.

I tried running Virtual PC 2004 on an AMD Althlon XP 3200+ based PC (with 1 GB RAM and 80 GB hard drive) and it basically locked my machine... Other people have had similiar issues. For more details visit the Microsoft VirtualPC forum at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualpc and look on or around entries for January 10th.

What could Microsoft have possibly done to this product to cause this issue! My mind boggles!

Since I'm testing the product for work, I've had to revert to a 1 GHz Pentium III based machine for testing. Still, at least it runs long enough to load another OS. Compatibility-wise it's inferior to Connectix Virtual PC 5.2. However, I suspect that this is more Microsoft marketing than anything else, since the previous version managed to run OS/2 and various Linux flavours without issue. I'm still working on getting OS/2 to work on Microsoft VirtualPC 2004...

Thanks for an interesting and informative read!

Regards

Paul