D.I.D laptop.

Threeofnine

A couple of months ago my elderly mother in law brought a laptop from D.ID.
(I won't mention the branch)

Got a call from her last week saying it wasn't working and that the screen had gone "all black and weird"

I told her to take it back to D.I.D mainly because I knew it was under warranty and because she lives far from me I couldn't see it myself to assess what might be wrong.

At D.I.D she was told by a certain employee that it was no longer covered under warranty because she had not renewed the anti virus trial which came with it.

Fair enough I thought.

So they took it to have look it over and see what the problem was.

A day later she was told by same employee that it needed to be "sent back" because it was "riddled" with viruses.

Telling me this over the phone I began to get suspicious. Something about the wording "riddled" didn't sound right to me. If you have a virus then fine, but to be "riddled" strikes me as abnormal. Especially since she uses it for nothing except her email and rip.ie So I told her to get it back from them and bring it to me on her next visit.

I couldn't be sure of anything because it's difficult to tell from her description of what she was being told and I wasn't sure if she might be getting muddled up.

Immediately after I switched it on I noticed she had accidentally switched on high contrast mode, making everything black and green. (For the visually impaired)

After switching that off, I downloaded Avast and Malwarebytes and ran multiple scans finding nothing. The laptop is running perfectly. No issues. Never any symptoms of anything.

The only reason she thought anything was wrong in the first place was the black and green high contrast.

New laptop working as smooth as I would expect it to.

Not sure what they were trying to pull there but you can guess..

Did they leave the high contrast mode on because they didn't know how to switch it off (very easy and easy to switch on by mistake) or did they leave it on to make her think it was infected still? Hmmmm.

mordeith

The bit about the warranty being voided because not taking out the full any virus offer sounds like complete crap

Threeofnine

mordeith wrote: »

The bit about the warranty being voided because not taking out the full any virus offer sounds like complete crap

To be honest the whole thing sounded dodgy from the start. :mad:

I'm glad I told her to get the laptop back and not pay a penny to anyone. I'm just concerned that other people might be getting duped into paying for unnecessary stuff this way. I wouldn't have expected that from someone at D.I.D :mad:
Might send an email to their management and explain the situation. If it's all down to a certain employee, I'm sure they would like to know.

Alanstrainor

Saying that the warranty was void due to not renewing the antivirus was complete nonsense and I think I'd want to have a word with the manager of the branch about that. Given the problem ended up not being anything hardware related and was easily fixed, perhaps you could leave it there. But for anyone to suggest that it was a major issue that was no longer covered under warranty as a result is outrageous.

TerrorFirmer

I would be sending a registered letter to DID head office over that. That's absolutely scandalous behavior and I'd want to know if that was being pushed by management as a tactic.