So, I finally went through and asked my wife to help me buy the Surface Pro 4 from PCHome. We found a nice offer where you got the Type Cover plus an Office 365 license (in Chinese, though) only paying an additional 990NT$. This actually saves you 4000NT$ if you’re going to get the Type Cover, and it gets you the Office license basically for free (I don’t think I’ll use it, since I normally work with LibreOffice, but my wife can get the license if she wants).
In any case, we bought it, and according to the website it gets delivered in under 6 hours. When they delivered the box at my wife’s office and she opened it up… it turns out there were TWO Type covers inside, and NO Surface Pro 4 at all. According to the invoice that came with the package, there was a Surface and a Type Cover, and the box was sealed, but at some point, someone decided he’d swap a Surface by a cover.
My wife called PCHome’s Customer care, and they said they would “look into it”.
As of now, we know even less than Jon Snow does. And we’re talking about a 59.880NT$ piece of hardware that vanished. :fume:
Wow! I never had this kind of problem with PChome.
The worst it happened was a product that came in the wrong size or color. In all cases, they accepted the return of the good.
I hope all goes well with you.
I’ve had mixed experiences with PCHome. Usually, all goes well: fast delivery, no defects in the product delivered, no reason to complain.
But then I’ve bought things that were just plain defective. Try to return them, and I can’t get through to a real human being - phone calls to recorded messages, my emails seem like they’re going to Mars. “Customer Service” is an oxymoron.
All things considered, I’d rather walk into a shop and purchase what I want from a living breathing body. It might be 10% cheaper on PCHome, but isn’t worth the hassle. However, there are some things that you just can’t find on the shelves at your local widget shop, so if you want it bad enough, just order online and hope for the best. If it goes badly, you can try for a refund, but don’t be surprised if you just have to suck it up.
P.S. Ricarte: I love your avatar.
P.S. Blaquesmith: Microsoft…I’m convinced B.G. named the company after his penis.
Apparently, they will pick the items back, but I don’t know if they will send the right ones instead or they will issue a refund.
If they issue a refund, I believe that’s the last thing we’ll buy at PCHome. I’ll go to BaDe Rd. To get it, even if they overcharge me.
What bothers me is that if you go to the Microsoft’s website, all the recommended dealers are online stores. (Some of them, like Kuai3, happen to have physical shops as well). The problem of going into a physical shop is that they won’t have the model you want.
I wanted the i7 / 16GB RAM / 256GB SSD model, and they seldom have those in the store. The most popular ones are the models with i5 and 8GB of RAM, and if they have an i7 model, it’s usually the one with 512GB SSD (by the difference in price, I could get an external SSD with 1TB, or a couple of 256GB MicroSDs for storage).
Then it’s go into a store, order the model, go back home, wait a couple of days, go back into the store, make the purchase, and go back home. You end up wasting a lot of time (sure, PCHome screwed up and I’ll have to waste my time anyways, but it’s not the most common occurrence).
In the end the problem was solved. They picked the faulty delivery, brought it to their HQ, and delivered the right product. The keyboard stickers weren’t right (it said it was the Type Cover WITH fingerprint ID, but it wasn’t), but it was the cover I requested anyways, so no problem there. Took some time to figure out how the keyboard function key worked (it’s kind of a Caps Lock key, not a Shift key), but I managed to do it in the end. The touchpad took some time to get used to but it’s really sensitive and very precise.
It is by far the snappiest Windows 10 experience I’ve had, specially when I disabled all the privacy-endangering options. I can’t get Cortana in my language anyways, and even if I did, she’d keep using Bing for searches, so I disabled her.
I’m really happy with the Surface, and I expanded the storage with the 128GB MicroSSDXC I had in my phone (it will suffice until I get an ultra fast 256GB one, which will still be much cheaper than getting the 512GB Surface).
Glad to hear it all worked fine for you, Blaquesmith.
Considering there was a typhoon and weekend in between the problem and the solution, it didn’t take long.
If you’re talking about http://shopping.pchome.com.tw/ you don’t need to talk to anyone to make a return. Log onto the site, go to the customer service center link, then the return link, you print out the cover letter it spits out, stick it on the original carton and they’ll come and collect and refund your credit card, couldn’t be simpler. I’ve returned many items over the years with zero hassle.
How does one go about doing this?[/quote]
I think this is a good summary of what can be done: fix10.isleaked.com/
But you can never be sure you disabled everything, plus it keeps updating itself all the time, and there is no setting to switch this off (non-corporate end-users are mandatory participants in the never-ending test program), and any new or changed privacy settings always default to on. So it’s a Sisyphean task, and in the end futile.
How does one go about doing this?[/quote]
I think this is a good summary of what can be done: fix10.isleaked.com/
But you can never be sure you disabled everything, plus it keeps updating itself all the time, and there is no setting to switch this off (non-corporate end-users are mandatory participants in the never-ending test program), and any new or changed privacy settings always default to on. So it’s a Sisyphean task, and in the end futile.[/quote]
The metered connection one is pretty useful, but it only postpones the downloads, it doesn’t cancel them.
In any case, for example, the privacy-snooping microphone and Cortana-related voice services are disabled automatically whenever you set a language which is not supported, or in a non-supported location. For example, I selected Taiwan as my main area, with English(UK) as the default language, but Catalan as preferred language for my apps. Windows told me that the specific combination wasn’t supported by these voice recognition services in my area, and disabñed them (I actually couldn’t activate them if I wanted to!).
It’s kind of sad that we have to look through loopholes to find out how to do something that should be easy.
If you’re talking about http://shopping.pchome.com.tw/ you don’t need to talk to anyone to make a return. Log onto the site, go to the customer service center link, then the return link, you print out the cover letter it spits out, stick it on the original carton and they’ll come and collect and refund your credit card, couldn’t be simpler. I’ve returned many items over the years with zero hassle.[/quote]
Over the years I believe I’ve tried to do that twice. Succeeded the first time, but dismal failure the second time. It may be, as someone suggested, because of privacy settings, but I don’t really know. Anyway, that experience made me very skeptical of buying things from PCHome just to save a small amount of money. I’ll still buy from them if it’s the only source for a particular product I think I need, but I’m mentally prepared to accept the loss if it goes bad. If I can get what I want from a shop staffed by real live persons, I much prefer to go that route even if it costs a little more than an online purchase.
If you’re talking about http://shopping.pchome.com.tw/ you don’t need to talk to anyone to make a return. Log onto the site, go to the customer service center link, then the return link, you print out the cover letter it spits out, stick it on the original carton and they’ll come and collect and refund your credit card, couldn’t be simpler. I’ve returned many items over the years with zero hassle.[/quote]
Over the years I believe I’ve tried to do that twice. Succeeded the first time, but dismal failure the second time. It may be, as someone suggested, because of privacy settings, but I don’t really know. Anyway, that experience made me very skeptical of buying things from PCHome just to save a small amount of money. I’ll still buy from them if it’s the only source for a particular product I think I need, but I’m mentally prepared to accept the loss if it goes bad. If I can get what I want from a shop staffed by real live persons, I much prefer to go that route even if it costs a little more than an online purchase.[/quote]
For a lot of items PCHome is actually more expensive than bricks and mortar and certainly more than other online options, however it’s because of the fast delivery (6 hours in a lot of cases) and generous and easy return policies that I occasionally use them. For instance Sunday noon my wife informed me that we were supposed to have a new blanket for my son’s playschool on Monday, the thoughts of battling through traffic, parking, dealing with idiots and wasting half a day melting were less than appealing. Picked up the tablet, ordered 4 that looked like they fitted the bill on pchome, got on with life and got a call at 7 from downstairs to say the delivery had arrived. Picked out the one my son preferred, stuck the rest back in the box, printed off the RMA and dumped it back to the security guard. Possibly cost 100NT more than if I had trolled through shopping center but definitely worth it.
No idea what privacy setting could be impacting your return, for me if it’s within 7 days I just go through the stated process, leave the carton with attached printout at our security station and wait for the refund.
[quote=“SuperS54”]
For a lot of items PCHome is actually more expensive than bricks and mortar and certainly more than other online options, however it’s because of the fast delivery (6 hours in a lot of cases) and generous and easy return policies that I occasionally use them. For instance Sunday noon my wife informed me that we were supposed to have a new blanket for my son’s playschool on Monday, the thoughts of battling through traffic, parking, dealing with idiots and wasting half a day melting were less than appealing. Picked up the tablet, ordered 4 that looked like they fitted the bill on pchome, got on with life and got a call at 7 from downstairs to say the delivery had arrived. Picked out the one my son preferred, stuck the rest back in the box, printed off the RMA and dumped it back to the security guard. Possibly cost 100NT more than if I had trolled through shopping center but definitely worth it.
No idea what privacy setting could be impacting your return, for me if it’s within 7 days I just go through the stated process, leave the carton with attached printout at our security station and wait for the refund.[/quote]
To be fair, it’s been several years since I had to return anything to PCHome, so perhaps their service has improved. Maybe they are OK now. I did order something from PCHome earlier this year (a Buffalo wifi router for my home network) and it arrived super-quick even though I’m in Taitung. Thankfully it had no defects, so I had no need to return it. Again, I would have preferred to buy from a bricks-and-mortar store, but this is Taitung and the selection of (quality) routers on the shelves is very limited.