Why I will not buy at OTA

[Peter Hiscocks]

Interesting story.

I've bought a lot of stuff from them over the years. I bought a tower from
them at one point and about a year later the power supply gutted the
machine, totally destroyed every thing in the box. I went back to OTA and
said 'this is not supposed to happen. This power supply was defective'. They
argued with me, but I have designed computer power supplies, so I know that
they should have a crowbar circuit that prevents this from happening.

They still gave me a great song and dance until I threatened to ensure that
Ryerson (where I work) never bought another machine from them. At that
point, they gave me a new machine at cost.

About 2 years later, the Abit motherboard in that machine bit the dust, and
that had a chain reaction of having to replace the scanner, the video card
etc etc. The tech guy in an unguarded moment said something like 'Yeah,
we've had a lot of the Abit boards back.' (Someone told me that this may
have been related to the counterfeit bypass capacitor scandal.)

On the the other hand, I have bought a lot of stuff from them that did work
as advertized, and their tech people seem to be mostly OK. So I wonder
whether one would get better service elsewhere. Part of the problem is that
the market for white boxes is *extremely* competitive.

Also, the previous manager at OTA had a more progressive and helpful
attitude. I know that when push comes to shove the current manager is not
going to be helpful.

I'd be interested in hearing about other dealers in the downtown core that
people have found to be helpful.

Peter




On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 10:47:00PM -0500, Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 01:34:50PM -0500, JoeHill wrote:
> > BTW, what's with this hatred of OTA? I've seen that come up on this list a
> > number of times, I can't say I've ever had a negative experience there. Their
> > tech, Cezar (sp?), *seems* to know what he's doin'...
> 
> Fall of 2002 I bought a laptop from their Bay Street location. The extra
> battery was back-ordered and they would call me when it came in. Two weeks
> later I called the store and they had closed...not for the day, I mean
> they'd closed. I called the location on College street and they had a
> vague recollection of who I was and, oh yes, they did have an extra
> battery that had been shipped over that was probably mine. I went to the
> College St. store to pick it up as they weren't willing to ship it to me.
> 
> Then I bought a wireless router from them (within weeks of having bought
> the laptop). I had to return it twice. The first two times the product was
> defective (the ethernet cord popped because there wasn't a proper "snap"
> in). The first time I returned the product I noticed they'd actually sold
> me a product that had already been returned. There was writing on the
> inside of the box and on the instruction manual. They refused to take the
> product back. Fortunately the guy who'd sold it to me remembered me. They
> yelled at *me* for having purchased a product that wasn't wrapped in
> plastic (how the hell was I supposed to know?).
> 
> The laptop came with a dual boot CD Win2000/WinXP. I did a dual boot of
> Debian/Win2000. I spent (literally) 30 hours with Acer tech support, the
> wireless tech support and physically going back and forth to OTA trying 
> to figure out the problem. I took the laptop back and asked them if they 
> could help me figure out if it was a faulty card. They flat out refused to 
> help. Sergio came close to offering assistance when he wasn't busy with new 
> customers--but that was only after I refused to leave until someone
> supported my brand new laptop. They said the only thing that I could do was 
> ship the laptop back to Acer for a week and that I would have to sign an 
> agreement saying that Acer was allowed to reinstall my OS and wipe all my 
> data. I finally got the wireless card working under Debian. Turned out that 
> although Acer and OTA both said that the WinXP drivers were for both XP and 
> 2000--they weren't. There was no Win2000 support for the wireless card.
> The Acer techs *still* don't believe me.
> 
> During this time I realized that the new router had the same defect as the 
> previous one. Instead of getting a third router with the same problem, I
> asked for a different brand. The second brand was $50 cheaper, so I asked 
> for the difference in price. They said no. So I asked
> for a refund. They said no. I wasn't within the original 14 (or maybe it
> was 7 days) from purchase. The owner told the clerk (in front of me) that
> he was not to give me any money back. I was *livid* by this point. But 
> seeing as the owner didn't give a shit, there was not much else that I
> could do. I told them that I would *never* buy from them again, and I
> would be sure to tell others never to buy from them again.
> 
> They wasted probably in the range of 30-40 hours of my time altogether. In
> a 2-3 month span of time I'd spent close to $4000 with them and they were
> not willing to give me $50 after having to return one of their products
> TWICE. Nor were they willing to give me a full refund on a product that
> was defective.
> 
> emma
> 
> -- 
> Emma Jane Hogbin
> [[ 416 417 2868 ][ www.xtrinsic.com ]]
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
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-- 
Peter D. Hiscocks                         	   
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering    
Ryerson University,                    
350 Victoria Street,
Toronto, Ontario, M5B 2K3, Canada

Phone:   (416) 979-5000 Ext 6109
Fax:     (416) 979-5280
Email:   phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org
URL:     http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~phiscock
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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