Mesh Computers PLC.
At the End of 2004 I had a bit of money spare for the first time in years and thought I'd buy myself my first laptop. Looking on the net I quickly found out that the best value computers were from a company called Mesh. They even had a sparkling array of awards from the usual computer magazines. In short, they looked like a sure bet. I picked their "power laptop" which was just on the wrong side of a thousand quid.
A month after I put in the order my notebook finally turned up, but proved unable to stay turned on for more than 30 seconds. After three lunchtimes waiting on their phone system I finally managed to get them to take it back and send me a replacement.
Nearly two months of phonecalls (and a day off work as they didn't deliver after 5pm) later I received the replacement. The DVD drive was jammed closed, it overheated and switched off every few hours and it made a noise like a broken lawnmower, but rather than wait for two more months for another one I opened the drive with a screwdriver and put it on bricks so some air could get into the fan.
Two months later it broke completely but fortunately this time I could fix it by reconfiguring the bios, though it took me about three hours of phonecalls to find this out.
Two months after that the DVD drive broke completely. Another good week of phonecalls later I managed to get a new one sent to me, but with no instructions and no help whatsoever.
Through this period I was working at a callcentre myself, so having to spend a fair amount of my free time on the other end of the line was little annoying. The queue to speak to anyone was 30 minutes at the very least, so I'd estimate I spent over a hundred quid calling them. I sent five or so e-mails through their website before realising nobody was reading tem and giving up.
After about ten months of stress the notebook fell about an inch onto a desk and broke completely. The motherboard was unrecoverably blown. Unfortunately for me I'd lost the piece of paper with the order number on it. Without this, it transpired, nobody at the company was willing to speak to me at all.
The next step would probably have been the small claims court if it hadn't been for the fact that I had recently moved to China. A month ago I finally got around to selling the laptop-millstone for scrap and got about 40 quid for the few usable parts.
The only satisfaction I can get out of this whole fiaso is if someone reads this and decides not to buy a computer from this appalling company. If I'd done my research properly before buying I'd have found many other account like mine, see here, for example.
( Zuowan, Sun 18 Feb 2007, 12:03, Reply)