One 36 Computing

After spilling a little water onto the keyboard of my laptop, the touchpad no longer worked as it should. There was no problem using a mouse, but as I prefer the speed of a touchpad, I took my laptop into 136 Computing and returned to collect it later that same day, only to be told that the only thing wrong with said laptop was that it contained no hard drive, and that I would need to purchase a hard drive from them at a cost of over £200. Needless to say, there was a perfectly good hard drive in the laptop.

As a Mac user I have found it difficult to find any computer engineers who can actually help me when I have problems. Now I have found One36 I needn’t look any further. Called them with a problem I was having syncing my iMac, iPad and iPhone, and their engineer came round that afternoon. It was clear it was a problem that he was very familiar with and had me back up and running within the hour.

I had a bit of a nightmare with my computer, it just stopped working. I rang one or two local computer shops to see who could handle asap as I had some important work to get done on it. One36 told me to bring it in straightaway and that they would get on with it that day. From dropping it off three hours later they called me to let me know it was sorted and ready for collection. Excellent service from a very friendly group of staff.

These guys are spot on. I took my computer, making some unpleasant noises to them and within a couple of hours they called me to tell me exactly what was wrong and gave me a price to fix it. By the end of the day I had my computer back fully working with all my pictures, music and stuff in place. Excellent service, will be recommending to my friends.

I took my custom built computer here to get it looked at around early June of 2008.

I was told that an 'assessment' is where the fault with my computer is located and a price for fixing it is given to me. The assessment would cost £30 which I was fine with.

The staff at first were very friendly including their engineer to whom I explained my problem (random restarts).

So I agreed to the 'assessment'. About a week later I was informed that I would have to pay an additional £10 for labour since the engineer had to 'work' on the computer.

At first I was frustrated as I had already agreed for an 'assessment' which INCLUDED finding the fault and quoting me a price for its repair, I did not agree to anything else.

Naturally I felt conned/scammed, I agreed to pay them to carry out an assessment, which, according to them involves finding the fault (therefore includes work/labour).

I spoke to the Manager/Owner face to face about this. Turns out that they had forgotten to give me their Terms & conditions which stated the labour costs that could be added on. Even if I had received their T's & C's I would have still complained about it being a hidden cost since it was not originally mentioned.

After all this I received a letter stating I was required to pay for labour, I called them and spoke to the secretary who happens to be wife to the owner/manager.

At first she was quite abrupt and rude to me, saying things along the lines of 'we dont want to see you again' which is something you DO NOT say to a customer!. I made it very clear to her that I did not want to pay for something that had not been done to my computer (finding of the fault) including labour. She ended up saying that the paying of the bill was "up to your conscience".

After this I emailed the owner/manager who clarified that my invoice had actually been nullified (after two emails to and fro).

I will never ever go back to this place until it is under new management, I have told all my friends to stay away from there and to instead go to Ideal computing, I urge you to do the same and not fall into the stress and con that I fell into.

It was an absolute nightmare.