azreal99

Quiet honestly, the 15% repackaging fee you mentioned would put me off using that company on its own. I genuinely have no idea what that would even mean, but if you have returned a genuinely faulty item there should be no additional charges to you as a customer. 
 
Tech companies tend to get high return rates, and it's often due to people not knowing what they are doing. Given that, they are bound to ask you questions about how you fitted a part/used a product - so that part seems reasonable to me and you probably shouldn't have been offended by that. Where you would rightly draw the line would be if the manager, as you say, was insulting and implying that you were being dishonest. Even if a company rep believes there may be some dishonesty, that should absolutely not be communicated to the customer until there is absolute certainty - at which point a claim should be politely declined in a formal manner. If the encounter was exactly as you described, then the guy needs retraining. I used to work for a company that did corporate training, and it sounds like he could use a course or two.
 
There is another issue though, which is that tech places tend to be a bit informal. Your customer service will tend to be too, which may lead to quips and the like that some people can take offence to if they're expecting a more deferential customer response (this is especially true in North America). As an example, I use a company in the UK called "Scan", who I think have excellent service - but there are some people in there who present an awful face to the customers. There is an amazingly grumpy woman who will actually shout at customers if they make an error filling out an order form or the like, and a tech guy who will treat you like an idiot if he thinks you've messed something up. Ordinarily, they'd not be allowed to work in frontline roles for a company, but it's a tech place and the rules have always been different. What they both are is very good at their jobs. So I returned a defective item and the tech guy literally said, "No way are you having that problem, you're just being stupid." He genuinely didn't mean to be insulting, and I find attitudes like that quite amusing so I just took a seat and waited for him to find out that it was exactly as I described. Once he realised that I wasn't wasting his time, which I assume 95% of people who present that kind of problem are, he had everything sorted in about 5 minutes and was genuinely excellent to liaise with. 

What I'm getting at is that you're getting a lot of responses that are saying "I've never had an issue with them", but different customers can have hugely different experiences of even the same rep. I regarded my service by Scan as being very good that day, but it sounds like you would have seen it as horrific, and you'd have had every right to react that way. What companies strive for is consistency of experience for customers, and it sounds like someone from NCIX has noticed your issue here and if the company has any sense they will now bend over backwards to rectify this issue for you - and you should let them try. This is an opportunity for them to improve their approach and turn a negative review into a positive one if you can be made happy, and word of mouth matters amongst the tech community. I would suggest outlining your view of this series of events into a completely non-confrontational letter to the NCIX rep that has contacted you here and see where you go from there.
 
It may be the case that managers there are trained to see a pattern of customer returns as a problem that needs to be resolved (as it may cost the company money), and the guy you encountered was therefore on completely the wrong foot when dealing with you. PC World in the UK are guilty of this, they don't differentiate between valid and invalid returns, they just treat anyone who returns multiple items as though they are being dishonest or clueless, and it's purely a training issue.
 
Give NCIX a chance to put it right, and they might surprise you. if they don't, ensure you never have any dealings with the again and write to them explaining why you are withdrawing your custom. I know that I'd take a letter like that extremely seriously in my line of work, and you may benefit customers down the line.

Don't start an AMD VS Intel war here.
Thanks

Pre-built is a bit pointless these days. Building a PC in the era of plug-and-play is just basically adult lego with a bit of extra thought put into it.
 
Buying a prebuilt system will cost you a lot more and really isn't much easier. Even for a new builder, you can build a system in an hour and have a better PC for much less money.
 
If you decide to go pre-built then that's fair enough, and it's your money to spend as you want, but don't do it because it's easier or you're worried you'll make a mistake. PC building isn't hard. Look at most of us on here.....complete morons.

Pre-built is a bit pointless these days. Building a PC in the era of plug-and-play is just basically adult lego with a bit of extra thought put into it.
 
Buying a prebuilt system will cost you a lot more and really isn't much easier. Even for a new builder, you can build a system in an hour and have a better PC for much less money.
 
If you decide to go pre-built then that's fair enough, and it's your money to spend as you want, but don't do it because it's easier or you're worried you'll make a mistake. PC building isn't hard. Look at most of us on here.....complete morons.

It's a variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Individuals with a basic skill set in an area will tend to both look down on those who lack that skill set and also overestimate their own skill in that area. People with genuine expertise, on the other hand, tend to judge themselves reasonably accurately, or more harshly. That's because they essentially know enough to realise how little they know.
 
Part of it is also the classic thing that an idiot can be defined as "a person who doesn't know what you learnt 5 minutes ago"....
 
However, most "PC builders" I've encountered have been insistent that "anyone can do this", which doesn't seem to fit with then thinking they are in some kind of elite group. What you will probably find is that either the more arrogant members of a community are the most vocal, or that you have a starting bias by which such arrogance annoys you and you therefore register it more readily.
 
TLDR version: Dunning-Kruger and you're biased.

Obviously I was talking about the actual physical building of the PC. But yeah, my first build took me about an hour to put the actual system together.
 
Clearly there is research involved, but I'd argue that following a youtbe video or the like when actually building is far less of a time-sink that is looking up components, which you have to do even if buy a pre-built system. The video seems to want to say that there is no time involved in selecting your pre-built, vs lots of time if you're building - but the majority of time involved in building a new PC is actually choosing the best parts. You also need to choose a pre-built PC with the best parts and the best value for money, so the time involved in those decisions is actually the same. Unless you're happy just to shell out for the first thing you see, which is a mistake in both cases.

I once climbed a mountain with a guy called Sven. Where's my bloody money?
 
Though, to be fair, I didn't let him "take me up the north mountain"....

An oft-replied-to topic this one, so this may have been covered - but here goes...
 
If you are asking this question, you probably don't have any formal firearms training. I read that you've been to the shooting range a few times, but if you're going to own and maintain a firearm you need to be properly trained. Without adequate training you are more likely to injure yourself/those around you than you are to fend off any imagined assailant.
 
If you get proper training then that process will probably answer this question for you, as you will get used to the feel of various types of weapons and develop a knowledge of how they work. You have to remember that it's not just about sticking bullets in and off you go, a poorly-maintained gun can seriously injure the user, so you need to know how to look after your weapon (add snigger here).
 
Internet forums are really no replacement for practical training from qualified professionals when it comes to weapons.

Good lad. Now buy all the rest and some snacks and you're set for the next year.

No. They do have a turn-based campaign map, like Civ V, but that's pretty much where the similarity ends. The Total War games have some limited city building options, economic, technological and diplomatic elements, but they are most (as the name suggests) about fighting battles. Civ is about your civilisation, and Total War is about your army. Unlike Civ, the battles are fought in real time, with you able to command individual units.
 
As to which to get, Napoleon is a good choice - people tend to find it to be an improved version of Empire. Empire had terrible AI and Napoleon fixed that, to an extent, though it isn't as broad as Empire - which was huge.
 
The two Shogun games are probably the best the Total War team have produced, but I don't think there's a bad game amongst them, personally, and I own them all. The best way to choose is to decide what period's armies interest you the most, and buy that game. Want to watch the Legion smash barbarians? Buy a Rome game. Want to command Samurai? Get Shogun. etc
 
Enjoy Napoleon. It's a great game.

My K70 has two small nicks in it, though they're not enough to bother me particularly. I only noticed them when I did a close inspection, but for someone else I can understand they'd be extremely annoying and deserving of a return.
 
It may be an issue with the quality of the aluminium. Aluminium actually comes in various quality grades, signified by numerical values. Does anyone have any idea what quality of metal they've used in the K70?

Just remember; if you don't like it, I was never here.....

I don't understand why people care what the device-of-choice is for others. Maybe I like iPhones, and maybe I prefer Androids. Both have their pros and cons, it's up to the individual user to determine which they like more.

This causes me a serious problem. Stephen Fry said it, and therefore it must obviously be true, but I can't get past the fact that Apple's build quality has fallen off a cliff in recent years and that Android is simply a better and more open operating system for mobile devices.
 
My wife, when I started up building PCs again, asked me why I would even bother when Apple are clearly better in every way. She was almost at the point of not wanting anything non-Apple within her field of vision - and even she is now leaving Apple (she recently switched to the Galaxy S5 and will not get another iMac or Macbook Pro when her current ones have seen out their lifespan) because of how badly they have dipped.
 
I agree with Fry that having a go at Apple users for simply being Apple users is ridiculous, because Apple has had tangible benefits for many users over the years (I don't know any design teams who don't use Apple, and up until the iPhone 4 there really wasn't a better smartphone on the market than what Apple was offering) - but to say Apple are still pushing innovation in a meaningful way strikes me as being misguided.
 
Apple products still look fantastic (take a bow, Mr.Ive), but their beauty is now very much skin-deep.

+1 intel 730, but I wouldnt use a raid config for your OS.  It will make it slower for booting.

I have to say that shifting my games onto an SSD had made a significant difference to performance, for me at least. The idea that FPS is the only important thing in relation to games seems a bit odd to me, but each to their own I suppose. I do care about load times, stutter and other things that an SSD can (and in my case, does) help with.
 
I don't agree that something cannot be said to benefit gaming unless it boosts FPS. That would be somewhat like saying optimised peripherals are pointless too, because they don't alter FPS either. But they do greatly improve your experience when gaming, and the same is true of SSDs. Shorter load times, less judder etc...all good.
 
TO THE OP: The advice to get a 120GB SSD and a mass storage HDD is solid. I use a 120GB SSD for my systems' OSs and it just makes life so much easier. Want to upgrade your OS? Fine, just deal with that one drive and leave everything else on your system alone. Want to work on a system with a damaged drive? Okay, just stick your 120GB drive in and you can sort out access very easily. It's not only useful for your specific system, it's also a good utility.
 
Once you get used to the SSD though, as was said, you'll not go back. I run 2 500GB SSDs for my main files and then mirrored HDDs for storage and primary back-up. It keeps everything quick, whilst retaining storage. I recommend it.