Hi guys,
I just thought I should warn any of you lot living in Scotland or thereabouts.
There is a company called Scotsys. They run the Apple Centre in Edinburgh and they also provide technical services connected with AppleCare (they're the guys who repair your computers under warranty).
Based on my experience, my advice is to stay away from them. Avoid them like the plague.
I've had a very bad experience with them and they have proved to be absolutely unreliable as well as utterly dishonourable.
I bought AppleCare on an iMac DV SE through them. Two weeks prior to the AppleCare expiring, the computer wouldn't wake up from sleep. I forced a restart and the iMac would not start up either. In both cases, the power button green light came up but I would only get a grey screen, and the hard drive would not spin up.
I unpulled the plug and let it rest for a few minutes thinking it might help (I had heard about degaussing the monitor and things of that sort).
After 15/20 minutes I plugged it back in and it restarted normally.
I phoned Scotsys up and described the problem. I also pointed out that my warranty was about to expire. I asked whether the problem that I was reporting was a serious one in their opinion and whether I should I take it in for repairs.
They said the problem was not known to them. Their advice was that with intermittent problems it is difficult to judge. They said to monitor it for the next ten days and to take it in if the problem recurred.
The problem did not recur for the next two weeks or so. Three weeks later, it happened again and I was able to restart it by following the same cold restart procedure. A month later the computer shut itself off. On restarting it, there was a hiss and a crackle and a strong smell of burnt stuff. Something quite serious had clearly happened.
I phoned Scotsys again and put it to them that in the circumstances I thought it fair that the computer ought to be repaired under warranty given that I had reported the problem before the warranty had expired and that they had declared the problem not a serious issue.
They were extremely unhelpful. I'll spare you the details of a long series of conversations with them. They have been refusing to acknowledge responsibility. I am now taking legal action against them. For I have discovered that the problem I had described to them, far from being 'not known', was so well known as to deserve the nickname of 'green light of death'. The symptoms I had described, I learnt, are the classic tell-tale signs of impending failure of the flyback transformer on the analog board. Scotsys failed to recognise, or rather pretended not to recognise one of the commonest problem with fanless iMacs.
My advice to anyone around Scotland is: stay well away from Scotsys if you want to buy Apple products or AppleCare.
By contrast, I got a very good deal from PC World in Dundee. Sad to say, you get better service from them than from Apple's own representative in Scotland.
Just thought it might save some of you much grief in the future,
Regards,
Walter
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