Watford Electronics , Noooo Don't Do it.
This all started back in January when my Carrera PC started acting up. The help line told me about Watford buying them out and that I'd get a letter through explaining that I'd have to pay to get Watford to honour the warrantee. I did all this and after £14 of phone calls finally got them to send an engineer out (a 7 day wait). He came and told me what I'd told them, the motherboard needed replacing. He had one with him, errr, that cheap rubbish isn't going in this PC. I'll have to get another one.
10 days later he's back after giving me a choice of motherboards. None of these had the 128mb of onboard graphics the original had so he had to bring another graphics card ,64mb, said he couldn't get the company to give me a 128mb one. Put the new motherboard in and the fire wire card wouldn't fit the new one. He told me that Watford would send me a new one and he took the old one away with the motherboard.
Since then I have sent countless e-mails to Watford to Jenny McMellon who is a customer services manager and to their MD demanding a fire wire card and a graphics card. I now have to take the legal route as these people can be described as nothing short of common crooks.
When I do get a reply I am told it is being dealt with, You'll be sent new cards, we'll send the engineer with the new cards, etc etc.
I know that they've taken a lot of money from former Carrera customers and no doubt have managed to get some of these sub standard motherboard into a few of them with out the user knowing.
I'll let you know what happens next but as it stands I'm just starting to fill out the leagl forms. If anyone has any advice then it would be much appreciated.
My advice to anyone reading this is DO NOT do business with Watford Electronics or their Savastore shop. There are plenty more retailers out there who wont just take your money and run.
Here's an update on my grumble. After hearing nothing from Watford concerning the graphics card and firewire card I was about to start filling in the online stuff to get a judgement against them as suggested on here. Last week out of the blue I got an email from Bushrs Sallem at watfrod asking me to choose the cards from the web site and they would be sent on. So I duly went to the site chose the 2 cards (I didn't even take the piss) and emailed the product numbers off.
I received a confirmation back but on entering my order area nothing was showing. I thought this was the usual Watford thing and just a scam. Amazingly the cards arrived 2 days later, or should that be 3 months and 2 days.
They even sent me through some nice leaflets of their special offers. Would I buy anything form them, not bloody likely. From my own experience and from what I've read on here Watford are your typical cowboy outfit, I imagine the review they get are more to do with advertising revenue than the products themselves. It's high time the computer mags out there did a survey on the customer service of these companies and then they might start changing their bad habits.
On a closing note those of you who are still suffering at the hands of Watford and Savastore, do go the legal route, these people need to be taught a lesson and you are all owed a lot of money.
Submitted by scubated