Random Rants

[Teho]

This isn't country-specific obviously, as I've had similar experiences here. My old Citroen, the first time I had it in for a periodical I used the garage of the local "official" citroen dealer. It returned with a good long list of flaws that needed fixing. It was also way more expensive than I expected (close to £2.000!!). So I took the car to a different garage that someone at work recommended. The guy there took a look at the list and the prices the first place had noted in the margins, and he just shook his head. Said he found it amazing that they had customers at all with prices like that, and guaranteed they'd do it "a lot cheaper". So I delivered the car there on the morning of the agreed upon date and later that day I get a phonecall from them. One of the things on the list that required fixing to have the car approved was the brake lines, due to heavy rust damage. This is a serious flaw that many older cars usually needs to deal with, and mine was ten years old so no surprise there. Well, the guy that called me said he'd now had all five guys there studying those lines and none of them could find anything wrong with them! In fact, it turns out that the brake lines on Citroens are part of their particular hydraulics system, it's not a separate system at all. And Citroen has made their cars with rust-free lines for their hydraulics since.. oh well before mine was made! You'd think the official garage would know this, right?

Anyway, they fixed the rest of the flaws at the other garage (which were genuine flaws) and it all ended up well under £1.000, less than half the original asking price. This was without the changing of brake lines though, which was one of the more expensive items on the list, but still.

For the next periodical two years later I decided to send it to that same official garage first, just for the hell of it. The periodical itself costs about the same everywhere, so no worries there. This time, oddly, there was no mention of the brake lines allthough nothing had been done with them since last time of course. I confronted the garage chief with this, and all he could do was mumble some half-hearted excuse that maybe his guys had confused the brake lines with the fuel line, which wasn't as serious a flaw.

I did the same thing, had the car fixed at the other place, and to the official place's credit the flaws they'd found were all genuine. And again the other place fixed it for half the cost the official place had estimated. So I've continued and will continue to do this with my current Peugeot and all future cars I will own; have the periodical at the official place since they after all know the car best and know what to look for, and then having the flaws corrected somewhere else. And it has always been a lot cheaper for me.

[Harrison]

You say the official dealers should know their cars the best, but that definitely wasn't the case with VW.

My wife's last car, an 04 Beetle convertible TDi had the airbag light permanently on. We took it to the local main dealer VW garage and they wrote us a quote. They said it was the airbag sensor and to replace it would involve removing the left-hand front wing and the whole front bumper and grill assembly to get to it, and once replaced it would need the to be recoded to the car. Quote was £700!

So we went away and I found a mobile airbag repair company that come out to your house. He took a look at the car and read the VW report. Looked very confused, and looking at the engineering schematics for the car, because the sensor was actually located under the passenger seat door seal and very easy to get to. It actually just needed an ECU reset of the sensor and then worked ok again. Cost... £45 total including the call out. Mad!

[Tiago]

My first car, a Ford Fiesta, when i took him to Official ford Garage for a repair, they gave me the bad parts so i could see that it was not a false repair. Of course they could brake something that was working... and say it was not...

[Stephen Coates]

*sigh*

I sold a perfectly good, hardly used modem on ebay and the buyer has decided that she can't get the ADSL light to light up, and is complaining.

I think I'll send a message just to check that she did turn it on with the power button on the back.

[Harrison]

It is reset back to factory settings? If the power light comes on and they can log into the hardware's configuration page via the browser, then it is proved to be working and it's their settings not working with their connection/ISP. They need to contact their ISP.

[Stephen Coates]

Well, she just said about the DSL light, not the power light. Even if the settings are wrong, I would at least expect the DSL light to flash.

I did do a factory reset.

[Demon Cleaner]

Still no news about my stuff, F*CKING ANNOYING me

[Harrison]

They do take their time for any insurance or warranty claims. We finally got confirmation that the Insurance has agreed to replace our shed. That has taken over 3 months to get agreed!

[Kin Hell]

No input for current dilema's, but a rant of my own........

But where to start.......

Bought a couple of GTX580's back along, 4GB versions & boy, were those things damn hot! I was facing a £500+ bill to upgrade my water cooled 1366 i7 rig to deal with these infernal Blast Furnaces so decided to eGay the gits & made a few bucks in the process. Picked up a couple of Gigabyte GTX670's & it was all Disco RE much cooler temps for another £130 outlay. No need for a massive 1200W+ PSU or water blocks as these cards are infinitely cooler & draw much less power than the GTX580's.

Having done this & seeing what Z77 & Ivybridge was capable of, I ended up with an Asus P8Z77-V Premium board, a 3770K CPU and decided to upgrade hard drive storage from a 2TB Segate Barracuda to a 3TB Seagate Barracuda.

Having installed the Asus boards 32GB mSATA SSD device, I added my 3 x Barracuda 500GB 7200.12's in RAID0 stripe & then added the 3TB drive which has all my backup files on it. During a reboot hanging session, mr bloody 3TB Segate shite decides to corrupt itself to the point, it takes nearly 14 days of continuous of chkdsk @ a DOS prompt on the desktop to try & recover ALL my 1.4TB backup partition to it's former glory. Unfortunately, it totally cocked itself up, meaning I lost everything on the partition. GRRRR you Mother B**TARD!!

230GB of Amiga Files:
120GB of pictures of my house restoration:
Shit loads of pr0n:
My entire picture collection:

Well, pretty much an entire lifetime of experiences......

I have recovered some of the files through chkdsk, & despite chkdsk actually completing twice during this 14 day period, most pictures were un-readable. The only pics I have recovered of the house renovations are ones sent via Email to a few friends, & they are only like post card sized files of around 100k from their original 4Mb JPEG sizes.....

I've moved on since the fateful day on Saturday last week, where I formatted the entire partition & licked my wounds. Holidays and some other precious moments are on DVD but ffs @ Win7 64bit being such a f'kin BS OS @ trying to recover from crap like this & the worst bit is......

I still don't know why it f'kd itself in this manner? - Seagate Tools for DOS passes every test possible on this 3TB HD, so I have to sit here feeling like...... W T F ? ? ?

The only solice I have is that chkdsk was sat running continuously & 4.9Ghz on this rig for 13.5 days uptime with at least a 12% CPU loading at any time & could still play CS:GO or BF3 or rip DVD's whilst it tried to un-F'k itself.

What a complete & utter Mofo Ball Ache ffs.......

[Harrison]

Sorry to hear you lost all your data. Not good. You know the saying. Make a backup, then backup the backup, then backup again! Relying on a single copy of files you can't replace is never a good idea.

Regarding the HDD. As you know, to use a 3TB HDD you have to use GPT and not MBR. However I understand that if a GPT HD is in a mixed system with other HDDs using MBR, then the GPT disk will drop down to MBR legacy mode (GPT HDDs have legacy MBR first sectors). I wonder if this might have caused any of your issues.