A few weeks ago I started having problems with the super-drive on my MacBook Pro. Basically, it was scratching (or should I say, severely gouging) any media that I inserted. I thought it was the drive, and phoned Apple who quite quickly told me that it could be repaired and my local repair centre in Ipswich.

Cool. Until I rang them up. They said, if it is physical damage then I would have to pay for the repair. This prompted a close physical inspection, which revealed that the slot on the front of the drive was slightly closed up, and this was what was doing the damage. Careful examination showed that the aluminium case was slightly buckled. Shit. I have carefully looked after this laptop, and at no point has it taken an impact that could have done this, and yet there it was – a sodding dent.

The Ipswich firm (not Apple, but a repair agent) told me that it would cost well over £200 for this. So, I didn’t do anything.

A couple of months later I can’t take not being able to use the drive anymore, so I arranged a consultation with an Apple Genius at the Manchester Apple Store – hoping that I was wrong about the physical damage that couldn’t have occurred.

The guy was good, very good. It was a pleasure to deal with someone who understood the kit well and had very good customer service training. Unfortunately, in the end it was still deemed as physical damage. This is my only beef, how did it happen?? I still don’t understand how the damage could have occurred and I raised my concerns about robustness of the aluminium case. Apple are convinced that the aluminium case lends excellent protection, and the guy showed me examples of machines that had received severe bashings, but were still working.

Deep down, I think a plastic case might be more likely to break, but would be cheaper to replace and more likely to be able to take a knock and bounce back to the original shape, whereas I suspect that the aluminium case would deform permanently under the same conditions.

Anyway, the repair is booked while I am on holiday, which solves the issue of whether I take the laptop with me!

You ran over a hedgehog in my car!

“Are you sure?”, I said.

Yes, because there’s a dent in the floor pan with the remains still there!

Oops.

Should I be surprised that Mr Dunstone hasn’t yet replied to my complaint? Well, I’m not.

I am still using the ancient brick phone from the bottom of my drawer, and have been without the phone that I should have for about 6 weeks now. I am making far less calls (no phone book or hands free kit), have almost totally stopped texting (too unwieldy) and have no GPRS usage (no bluetooth). Perhaps I should be happy that CPW haven’t sorted out my problem as it is saving me a fortune.

Full details may be posted here if things carry on the way they’re going. BTW, I have received a couple of dozen hits from Google already on the topic of Carphone Warehouse repairs so I’m sure there is an audience wanting to know more details – not saying yet though.

UPDATE: 5th May All has been resolved – although it is hard to get past the scripted customer service droids, once I was able to speak to someone with authority then things went reasonably smoothly after that. If you are at a total dead-end, I recommend you ask for details of where to send complaints, and then follow it up.

UPDATE: 24th April 17:10 CPW have no new Samsung D600’s, so I have to go and pick an alternative. Oh joy.

UPDATE: 23rd April 12:50 Carphone Warehouse have just offered me a brand-new replacement Samsung D600, which should be arriving tomorrow. Hopefully, that’ll be the end of the matter.

I have had phone after phone replaced with non-working refurbished junk and been met with a total brick wall – “All we can do is get yet another broken refurbished replacement, sir!”. I’ve now sent an email to Mr Dunstone (as per the advice of Customer Services).

I’ll post an update when I hear from him – who knows? It might be a good update.

After responding to a query this morning about whether, with all the problems being discussed here, the Boilermate system was worth considering, where I said that it was a luxurious system,, I had a bit of a scare that mine was broken again.

I went out for a 3 mile run before lunch, and got back to find that the shower had no hot water. In fact, there was no hot water at all. After pulling the front off of the Boilermate to start finding out what was wrong (with just a towel wrapped around me, swearing and cursing because I wanted a shower) I noticed there was NO power at all. I shout down to Alison who goes “Oops, I must have knocked the switch when I moved the TV on the kitchen worktop”. At least I know now that you can isolate the power without manually pulling the fuse on the main board.

As I mentioned before, my bike has been a bit of a sod to get right. The gears needed tweaking a few times before they would change properly on the front gears, I had two punctures in 5 days, and the really annoying thing was a clunking coming from the front crank regardless of which gear was selected.

Kudos to Cycle King of Colchester who dealt with the problems in a most professional manner and kept at it despite my many return visits to the shop.

My bike is now running like a dream with smooth gear changes and a very quiet operation.

I left my car too long for its service – but had it booked in for last Thursday. The bastard thing THEN decided, two days before it was going in, to finally wear out its brake pads.

Since it was now fairly (very) unsafe, I decided to take Alisons car to work. Half way to work, engine management light comes on and I can almost hear it laughing at me.

Anyway, both cars end up at the garage for most of the week and we get them back on Friday.

Guess what? Neither made it through the weekend.

On the way to swimming (no phone, minimal money, etc), I fill up at Tesco – and as I put the nozzle back on the pump I heard a running liquid sound – I look under the car to see a river of petrol running across the forecourt. Loads of fun, especially with pushing the car away from the newly formed petrol lake to allow them to make a new beach feature, mostly consisting of playpit sand bought over from the main store.

Alison’s cars engine loses all power at low revs, just when pulling away.

Hopefully, mine is all sorted now – but Alisons is still at the garage being “diagnosed”.

Our hot water gradually started failing again after about 6 weeks of pure bliss. The symptoms were the same fluctuating water temperatures that we had before. Just less extreme in both the duration of the cold swings and the intensity.

This time, I couldn’t diagnose the issue from the self-tests. So, we put up with it and put up with it until no more could be taken.

I rang up Gledhill and started up a tirade, basically explaining that they needed to start getting together a strategy for post-sales (especially post-guarantee) support. I suggested a register of Gledhill experienced plumbers, or a web based bulletin board. I got nowhere, except a phone number of a guy in Southend who may be able to help.

Someone in the office who overheard my call suggested that I phone “PG Bones Ltd” in Braintree as they were the firm doing Boilermate installations for Wimpy Homes where he lived.

So, we gave them a call, and in no time we had a guy out who sorted the problem out within half an hour. Brilliant.

The problem was that the other sensor (the DHW sensor) had also failed, so we must have had a couple from a faulty batch.

A few weeks on and everything is still fantastic, shower nirvana, lovely.

Angier.co.uk was down for about 12 hours today due to a blown power supply. I hope it didn’t inconvenience anyone!

Since my server is about 200 miles away from where I now live, and I didn’t truly know the nature of the problem, I was relieved to find a friend of mine (Roy) was in the vicinity. Roy kindly popped around to Maplin, bought and then fitted a new power supply for me, and we are now back in action.

Thanks very much Roy, you’re a star!

Yesterday, while explaining our long running problem with our BoilerMate heating system to Alisons father, I had a revelation. The problem was that due to low water pressure, we couldn’t run more than one tap without the hot water slowing down to an absolute crawl. The revelation was that the low water pressure may be due to the previous owner not turning on the mains stopcock fully. I was right, and we now have high pressure hot water and the ability to run multiple taps, flush toilets without stopping the shower, etc. Luxury.

Our day today got off to an excellent start when Tiffany came downstairs in a fluster to tell us there was a problem with the shower. The shower tray had overflowed and the bathroom carpet was soaked through. It transpired that the water in that shower had always had a tendancy to build up in the tray, but because of the improved water flow it now had the ability to overflow!

I can understand why it never occurred to her to tell us, but I would have hoped that she would have thought it odd standing in water up to her ankles. Further investigation revealed an unfitted central heating pump in the space under the shower, two screws in the waste trap and a considerable volume of hair – all of which has been removed and all is working again. We just have to wait for the carpet to dry out.