Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m not a fan of PC World. In fact, I strongly dislike PC World.
Why, you may ask? Well, here’s why.
- Whenever you take a PC in to be repaired at PC World, they will invariably dump their purple and orange bloatware on your machine (along with a few adverts) under the pretence of being a ‘performance test application’.
- As they connect your machine to a different monitor, it occasionally comes out of it thinking it’s got two screens and letting the cursor veer off into non-existence.
- Contrary to what their advertisements would have you think, 80gB is not ‘massive’ by today’s standards. True, 80gB is a respectable amount, and massive in comparison to the 20gB disks you used to get a few years ago, but massive is more like 500gB (or two such disks in a RAID array, making 1tB). (Oh yes, and don’t forget the fake hard disk capacity counting system.)
- Don’t be fooled by the Tech Guys service - you’d be much better off asking your technically-minded friend from down the road to do it, as he/she will probably provide a friendly, reliable and informal service, is less likely to patronise you, and will almost definitely do it for a fraction of the price PC World charge (if they ask for a fee at all).
- They seem to have some kind of vendetta against Linux. They won’t sell any out-of-the-box Linux-compatible WLAN cards, and refuse to repair hardware if Linux is installed on it (presumably because they can’t put their bloatware on it).
- They still list items on their website that have been discontinued.
- Their staff feel undervalued - you can just see from their facial expressions when they serve you.
- The only machines on which Windows isn’t installed are the Macs. But can we not have some kind of option? Can’t we opt out of the Microsoft tax?
