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Dom Robinson presents

Why you should never trust Medion and their PCs.

Cover Back in early April 2003, while I was thinking about buying a new PC, my attention was drawn to Aldi's latest newspaper advert which showed a high-spec PC from Medion (Titanium MD8008, right) being sold in limited quantities that Thursday for a mere £799, containing an Intel Pentium 4 2.6GHz processor, 512Mb RAM, a 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics card, DVD-ROM and DVD re-writer and Windows XP. I was fairly fed up of a three-year-old P3 600 with Windows 98SE pulling all kinds of stunts it could get away with, bought from are-they-still-going RAM Computers in Fallowfield, Manchester.

However, I wasn't able to queue up at the early dawn and learned that they were all sold within the first half-hour anyway, which was the equivalent of one-per-minute, but on going into the store a few days later (since Aldi have no phone or email contact details, and thus encourage you to make that trek for even the smallest enquiry), I found they were taking names for when stock was next in stock, 4-6 weeks later. Sure enough, after that time I got the phone call and went down to buy it.

Since day one I had a problem with it - the output from the graphics card to the TV through the s-video output. After extensive testing of all possibilities, I concluded the problem was definitely within the PC and not from any extraneous sources since I unplugged everything I could think of and also tried plugging the s-video lead into a VCR, so I knew it wasn't the TV, the monitor, the Sony amp, the PS2, the TiVo, the Xbox, the DVD recorder, etc, etc.

Since the support comes from Medion and the store takes no part in organising this, it took some time before a call-out could be arranged initially because I first asked if a card could be sent to me to try out instead of taking a day off work to do a 5-minute job, which they refused. Then, then when a call-out was looked into the suppliers were out of stock of these for some time.

Medion were also often quite slow to reply by email, but while some of this could've taken place over the phone I wanted to keep it in written form in case I needed it for later, and that proved necessary in this case. Not all the emails listed below to and from Medion are date-stamped but I have listed them all in chronological order.

Since Medion eventually replaced the card once, in August 2003, and the problem was still there, it appeared after also doing meticulous research online, the problem was down to the build of the graphics card itself and thus gives a faulty display when viewing the s-video output on a TV, which looks like an iffy analogue Channel 5 picture with diagonal lines going across the screen.

Cover This problem never occurred on my previous PC, and while trying to sort this problem out I saw Staples were selling the Cybercom 1571PC (right) for £598.99, recently discounted from £899.99. There wasn't much info about it on the ticket that told me if it was any good, so I did my research online. On the down side, it turned out to be a Medion PC (it looked the same, but why the need for a different name?), but with Staples 14-day no-quibble return guarantee I had nothing to lose to at least take a look at it.

However, it turned out the one on display was the only one left - all the rest had been stolen in a break-in the previous weekend and there were no more of that model due in. It took some convincing on my part to allow them to sell me the display model, and I got it a day or two earlier than they'd have liked because of my insistence to look at it over the August bank holiday weekend, but I managed it. I did ask if there was any chance getting a further discount on it for being a display model but they couldn't do it (to be honest, I was in agreement that it was already a bargain for the price, so that wasn't a problem). All I had to do was boot up and get testing. I did have to do a System Restore, since it was still registered to Staples - but then I had rushed them into selling me the machine, but I was glad of this as it taught me how to go through one since I knew I'd need to do this eventually when taking it back to Aldi.

Upon switching on, everything worked a treat. The Cybercom PC, while being £200 cheaper, has a lower-spec graphics card in a 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 - but runs the heavily-graphics-intensive Tron 2.0 without complaint - and no TV capture card (although I have a DVD recorder so no real need for such a card), so all I had to do once I had copied across all my files was to reformat and return to store.

Given all the problems with it, I figured Medion would want this PC tracked back to them so they could find out what was wrong with it, but they didn't want to know, as the emails below will show. I know my contract was with Aldi, but still gave them the chance to track it back and told them I was now rejecting the PC, but they still snobbishly insisted all they could do was to look at it in their HQ to see if they could isolate the problem, practically blaming my environment for the problem (which I knew there wasn't) and then saying that in their labs there was no way they could recreate my environment, so by their own logic this extra testing would prove nothing!

After my last email from Medion, rather than take the PC back to Aldi initially, I wanted to put it in writing to them since I thought the problem would take too long to explain in person. After no reply to my letter for two weeks, I took it down on Saturday October 18th 2003, and was told that they'd tried to phone me twice (no messages on my answer phone, nor 1571) and that I was just better taking it straight in effectively because they don't go into detail with such problems - they just give you a straight refund, which was all I was after but wasn't sure if I'd get that straight off.

At the end of all this, I now have the PC I wanted and at £200 cheaper than I was expecting. If both Staples and Aldi were selling the same PC in future then I'd lean towards Staples simply because of the fact that the 14-day no-quibble return guarantee for PCs (30 days for other products) is in writing and up on the wall. I would, however, still consider Aldi as the next choice because when I went in with the PC, I got my refund within minutes after speaking to the manager. I was told at first that such refunds normally took 48 hours, but I'm presuming it was due to my letter setting out the emails to and from Medion that he had alreay discussed this with the area manager and after he went to make a quick phone call, all I had to do was produce my Switch card to enable the refund.

Would I buy a Medion PC again? Well, the Cybercom machine is working fine, so that's a good start, so I think yes, I would. I'd just get it from Staples first, then Aldi second, and take it back if it wasn't fully functional without giving Medion a shout due to their incompetent attempts at customer service, the emails below proving that their attitude matches the quality of some of their products.

I'd never buy Time/Tiny, due to their unbelievably appalling track record of how the promised contents are never up to scratch. I'd never buy any PC from Dixons/Currys/PC World (all part of the Dixons Stores Group, along with The Link) as their know-nothing work-shy staff won't even have heard of the Sale of Goods Act, let alone know how to switch a PC on or fit a component. I'd also be loathe to build my own PC again, since I tried this several years ago and it didn't work at all. Even after getting the mail-order company in question to put it together, on return I switched it on and the power supply unit started to burn! Maybe I was just unlucky, but although I'm told that building your own PC means you can have exactly what you want inside, you wouldn't save much money these days - if any - and I can easily do my own research on the contents of pre-built systems as to whether the components are branded (as in the case with the Medion/Cybercom PCs) or unbranded, as are often found in others.

As an aside, I think the Medion MD8008's soundcard also had an issue with recording via the line-in as the sound was always distorted, even on the lowest setting. I had no such problems with my previous PC, nor the Cybercom.