Don’t buy any PC Line DVDs.
They are overpriced(as everything else in Dixons), the DVDs can only be burned at x2.2 and the worse of all: The DVDs will become UNREADABLE after a month or so.
I have lost about 15GB of data thanks to you Dixons. :wally
Nobody out there to sympathise with me? 
I won’t buy anything at Dixons thanks to all I’ve heard from people who used to work there. In terms of unfair employment practices, they are the Wal-Mart of Europe.
Arf!
I feel your pain, Dawg. But I had no idea what Dixons was.
Dixons are simply too expensive for the products they offer.
There’s one in the Wakefield shopping mall, which I cna’t recall its name, anyway its running a closing down sale, to move to an out of town tin shed shopping car park district.
Even with 50-60% discounts they are still more expensive than PC World, which is quite something given the high prices of the latter.
I just pick up my copy of Micro Mart, look up the advertisers and buy mail order, usually from Aria, or Spell Software but there’s plenty of others.
I remember the whole Mastercare(Disastercare) thing where folk were paying large amounts for appliance insurance and finding out that it was completely unnecessary, unfeasably expensive, or that the company Mastercare changed ownership and was not making good on repair contracts folk had already paid handsomely for.
Can’t see why anyone would need Dixons at all.
PC Line is a cheapo own-brand line of computer consumables. You buy cheap and nasty, you get cheap and nasty.
But you have my sympathy anyway…
I used to be in the home electronics repair game, and so I know a couple of people who have worked for Disastercare.
The procedure in the repair shop is as follows.
The shop is divided into a couple of rows of booths or cubicles, and in each one there is a technician who has a certain part of the range assigned to theim, partly based on specific skills but if its busy(and it always is) then jobs just get passed to anyone available.
The jobs are brought to the repair bay on a trolley, which is supposed to also be loaded with a basic spares package and the referance material such as circuit diagrams for the item to be repaired, along with the all important work docket that the techie has to fill in detailing what has been done, and it also has the time allowable for the repair.
Now how can you estimate how long it will take to repair something if you haven’t even got the thig open ?
Take some kind of average, home electronics tend to have what are called ‘stock faults’, if one particular model has a faulty tantalum capacitor (nothing special - just a type name), then you can bet that every other item in that production run has the same fault
This gets your repair times down and allows you to achieve your bonus.
However, it also means that the tech has perhaps 7 minutes to repair every possible kind of fault in the product, so what the tech does is take a quick look, if it appears to them that it will take longer, then they will repair the stock fault that would have disabled the product anyway, and book it as a repair, and, not having time - the real fault is left for some other sucker.
Home electronics repair has been reduced to a production line, the techs can make good money, but only if they hit their figures and there is lots of incentive to do so, as the basic wage is basic indeed.
Some of those techs are incredibly good, they need to be but the way the incentives system is set up it is open to abuse.
Now DisasterCare don’t just work for Dixons, they also work for other mass high street retailers, and anyway many of those retailers appear to have differant names but are just divisions of the same company, check out which high street store come under Kingfisher Groups as a good illustration.
This means that duff items can be passed across differant divisions, by accident or design, I’ll leave that to you dear reader.
Home electrical/electronic appliance insurance is actually very cheap, believe it or not you can get a quote on the Lloyds insurance exchange and there are companies who specialise in this if you don’t want to go to the trouble of instructing a broker.
I have seen insurance quotes on tv shows such as Watchdog at well under one third of the Dixons et al asking price, and depending upon the make and model, you can do substantially better than that.
Better still, get quote for several makes of appliance, say compare differant fridge freezers, and you can bet that the one that gets the lowest quote if the most reliable, and the liklehood is that you don’t even need additional insurance(no more than the mandatory manufacturers one year guaruntee) at all if you purchase one of these.
Whatever your buy, if you really must have an extended warranty, go to an independant broker, the coverage is more comprehensive, they are much cheaper and the repair service is better.
The only things I would consider taking out such a warranty is on a washing machine(I can repair them anyways so I guess I wouldn’t) or on a plasma screen tv set as these things need regassing from time to time, everything else there really is no need, if it works for the manufacturers warranty time it will keep working for a good while longer, except for those Dyson Vacuum cleaners which really don’t like being used three or four times a day so if you have fluffy and constantly moulting pets you’d be advised to consider your options carefully.