I fried a customer's HD. What do?

[LifelineIT]

Awesome. Good guys finish first, once in a row.

 

[drjones]

Wow, was there no warranty help at all from Dell?

Would Dell not work with you at all? Did you tell them that you yourself had checked the computer that you sold her and it was faulty?

The whole system was a bad, you had to replace everything? You couldn't fix it by swapping any of the parts with known good parts?

That was nice of you. I hate lemons. It makes me feel bad when something like that happens to a friend or family member or like you said a sweet lady who is the mother of a childhood friend.

It's been a while now but I think there were several issues:

1) It can take a long time to work with Dell's customer service on home-grade PCs / not the ProSupport. That means I either have to spend my valuable time doing it, or pay a tech to do it.

2) I think in trying to resolve the issues, I downgraded the PC to Win7, which I think would have violated the warranty anyway. It came with Win8 preinstalled, and no 7 downgrade.

Unfortunately I still have that box sitting in my office...someday I'll get around to taking another look at it to see if I can fix & resell it or donate it or something...

 

[B Trevathan]

EDIT 3: 3/28/2014: Thanks for all the responses. Maybe I just needed to hear from the masses to validate what I was already thinking. A hundred bucks isn't worth the potential ill will from a dissatisfied customer. I agree with LifelineIT: I performed a partial task (not to completion) and then damaged working (albeit crippled) equipment. (If it was the adapter that caused it, then if it wasn't his drive I fried, it'd be the next customer. So I'm go to replace the adapter regardless as a preventative measure.) I'm going to replace his drive, reinstall the OS with his product key, install all updates/Adobe/Java/Firefox, set his home page to his webmail page, give him a big apology and not charge him anything. If he has other applications life MS Office or whatever, I'll reinstall those from his media when I deliver back to him. Thank you to everybody who posted with suggestions. I appreciate all the feedback. For me, customer service and reputation trumps profit.

EDIT 4: 3/29/2014: I delivered the PC back to the customer today. Once I got in to his assisted living facility room, I told him I had good and bad news. He asked for the bad first. I explained what happened, apologized profusely, told him I bought a new HD at my cost, reloaded Win7, AVG, Adobe, Java, all security updates and set browser home page to his AT&T webmail page for him - and that I wasn't going to charge him for any of it. My business lives and dies on customer referrals and word of mouth and I wanted him to be satisfied that I did everything possible for him. He was very appreciative, and sympathized that in his previous work experience in dry cleaning sometimes accidents happen. Well, a few minutes later his lady friend from upstairs came down and I explained it all again to her. She was much more impressed with what I did to rectify the problem. I told her I wasn't going to charge him/her for anything. She protested and said I should charge him/her something. I told them I wasn't going to give them a dollar figure - they could pick whatever they felt comfortable. I was ready to accept $0 and would be privately grateful for anything greater to defray the cost of the HD as well as my labor. As he pulled out a fat wad of cash, they bantered a bit back and forth about what was enough and finally handed me a $100 bill. I was surprised at this large amount and I asked him AGAIN if he was sure he wanted to pay me that much. He insisted and I reluctantly but gratefully accepted. As long as he doesn't download every optimizer, registry fixer and toolbar helper again, I think everybody is a winner here.

That's great, sounds like everybody is happy. You did what you thought was right and got paid for it too. I'll bet they will be repeat customers.

I'm such a kid at heart - I'm thinking you've got two new pieces of broken hardware you can crack open and see how they where made and see if you can find what went wrong, fun, fun.

 

[B Trevathan]

Unfortunately I still have that box sitting in my office...someday I'll get around to taking another look at it to see if I can fix & resell it or donate it or something...

I was thinking it sounds like an intermittent hardware problem, may throw a version of Linux on it and use it for while as a test machine and see if the problem gets worse.

 

[Larry Sabo]

EDIT 4: 3/29/2014: I delivered the PC back to the customer today. . . . As he pulled out a fat wad of cash, they bantered a bit back and forth about what was enough and finally handed me a $100 bill . . . . I asked him AGAIN if he was sure he wanted to pay me that much. He insisted and I reluctantly but gratefully accepted. As long as he doesn't download every optimizer, registry fixer and toolbar helper again, I think everybody is a winner here.

Well done! Thanks for the update.

 

[Kaizen]

I can see both sides of charging or not charging. We probably would have still charged for the cleanup. The client had a barely functional computer and wanted it fixed. I don't think most clients care if you do a manual cleaning or nuke and pave along with helping them install all their needed programs(make them whole), so long as in the end you solved their problem. I think giving the gentleman a new harddrive, along with a clean install of windows, helping him with any missing programs along with setting up his printer is great service. In the end you could make a point he came out way ahead. As someone made reference to an ipod repair in another thread. Once we broke a motherboard while doing an ipod screen, we bought the client a brand new one and charged the price of the cracked as we originally quoted. The clients were thrilled to get a brand new one. I did not feel crooked about the way we handled the ipod or how we may have handled the OP's client if we were in his shoes.

I always tell my techs to look at it from the clients perspective(which is inaccurate and based on our personal way of seeing the world), when making important decisions. I guess the differences between the way we handle issues and the way other techs handle issues is based on what we think is right. I suspect the techs who would charge something would feel that is how they would expect to be treated. If I went to an auto mechanical for a $1000 repair to an interal part of my engine, but do to his error, he broke something on the engine and his only solution was to install a brand new motor, I would still expect to pay him the original estimate of $1000. That is just my personal opinion.

 

[nlinecomputers]

They do care if you Nuke and Pave and make no effort to save the data. By accident this guy did basically the same job Geek Squad does. The OP got a lucky break on what was otherwise random disaster.

Sorry I with most of the others here. I can't see any way that I could justify charging anything on this.

 

[Kaizen]

They do care if you Nuke and Pave and make no effort to save the data. By accident this guy did basically the same job Geek Squad does. The OP got a lucky break on what was otherwise random disaster.

Sorry I with most of the others here. I can't see any way that I could justify charging anything on this.

If data would have been lost, that would have changed everything, in that case we would not have charged him. In fact if needed we would pay a professional for help with the data recovery.

 

[joseluisxp]

Just replace the driver for one with the same Size at your cost(They are pretty affordable this day) in the case that the user data was loss dont charge hin anything, but if you are able to get it back just do a clean intalls using the Key of the system put the data back and charge hin the Virus remove fee.