PC World

I purchased a Toshiba budget laptop from PCWorld in London, having first reserved it for store collection on the PCWorld website. The purchase itself went smoothly and the machine worked fine for the first couple of months. Then it started to freeze on me, at random and without warning. The freezes began to occur with increasing frequency, making the laptop unusable, so I finally called PCWorld's helpline. Transpires that this service is outsourced and there is no coordination between the two. After waiting hours for a human voice, I finally got through. But they refused to pick up the laptop until they were satisfied that I couldn't fix it under their telephone supervision. So I gamely spent hours and hours on calls with them, running diagnostics checks, deleting programs, reducing background memory usage, etc. It made no difference, so I visited the store - perhaps a dozen times over the next 3 months. They refused to refund or replace it until they were satisfied that it was broken beyond repair. So they took it in to repair, several times. Each time returned it to me with the problem still intact and the store staff ever more po-faced. In all, my laptop was in PCWorld's hands for a total of 7 weeks, during which time they managed to scratch the hardtop but contributed zilch toward resolving the freezing. Despite the persistence of the problem, and their own policy of replacing any product in which a serviced problem persisted for over 28 days, they refused to replace it on the grounds that they hadn't seen it freeze so there wasn't anything wrong with it! Eventually I took it home, waited till it froze in due course, then returned to show them this new proof. They grudgingly agreed to give me a store credit for the laptop. I am about to pick a replacement at PCWorld, but I would much rather go elsewhere. Avoid this retailer like the plague. Their prices may be attractive, but the aftersales service would make a Third World apparatchik blush in embarrassment.