PC repair companies: are they the ones that need fixing?

A new Which? investigation reveals poor quality repairs, aptitude and pricing from major high street retailers and consumers paying over the odds for simple repairs.

We installed a simple software fault onto 24 laptops so they wouldn’t boot up. We took one laptop in to the in-house repair departments of six different branches of The Carphone Warehouse, Currys and PC World plus six independent shops. We also took a MacBook into six Apple stores.

We found:

  • None of the retailers’ repairers successfully fixed all of the laptops taken into their branches and overall only 40% of the laptops were repaired correctly.
  • Five of our mystery shoppers were charged more than £100 for a repair that should have cost less than £50 – and one branch of Currys and PC World charged nearly £170.
  • In nine cases the repairers failed to fix the laptops altogether despite our test lab being able to repair them in minutes.
  • Seven of our mystery shoppers had to buy unnecessary new hard disk drives and one lost all of their data.

Which? editor Richard Headland said:

“It’s shocking that major high street retailers are failing consumers when faced with such basic repair issues and are charging people through the nose in the process. We want to see improved staff training and repair procedures as well as fair and consistent pricing so people can be confident in the services they receive.”

Notes to Editors:

1. The full investigation can be found here.

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