As a customer of Evesham with a very expensive (read overpriced) laptop with an On Site Warranty through the Home Computing Initiative, I had a lot of interaction with the support staff.

My machine is still under a warranty service, with Evesham, but I've not been contacted with an alternative.

As a piece of hardware it has been the most unreliable piece of hardware I have ever owned, having had the LCD panel and system board replaced more than twice to solve separate faults, as well as physical damage caused by neglegant packaging at Eveshams end.

What really annoyed me, was the selling point of on site service, but in reality, after 1 on site visit to swap the dvd drive, every other fault had to go back to the depot. If it had n't been through the HCI my legal recourse would have been better.

All through the troubles at Evesham, I found the support staff, professional, helpful and willing to assist me, and for that I'm grateful. Some of the troubleshooting was questionable, and resulted in a number of repeat visits.

I do think that Evesham Management really missed a trick here to use an asset it had to better effect, if it had sourced more reliable equipment to resell, it would not have had to re-repair the machines it had to. In my office we had plenty of repeat failures.

The same name used by Evesham for their range of LCD TV's. Could this be a CLUE to Mr Austins intenstions.

Flogging, LCDs etc. Sounds like it to me.

So the little fat Hobbit ( Austin ) will be out Car Booting them to the population of Evesham and Worcester.,

He used to have an interest in a TV/Satalite company in the late 80's.

Sounds like you got a bad'un as I previously bought hundreds of Evesham PCs, Servers and Laptops with very few problems - less than 2% probably.

I'm sad to see a British Company go down the tubes but really hope we've seen the back of Austin as, in recent years especially, he's become someone who only cares about his pocket and stuff the customers.

Just glad the the majority of the really decent staff there have escaped elsewhere now as the folks who worked there were top class and didn't deserve the shafting that Austin gave them.

Alqemi was the name of a bunch of TV's that Evesham sold. Maybe Austin's new company will continue trying to sell low quality LCD TV's.

Maybe in your case, but at a previous job we came to rely on Evesham because they gave us low cost, good spec, reliable workstations and servers. Compared to previous vendors they were an absolute godsend. Damn shame they've gone under.

Good staff in general, but the units I got from Evesham were questionable.

In particular I did not take at all to the idea that they would ship you a rebadged laptop, and then when you contacted them, would refer you to third party sites, and not know 'their equipment'. I had little choice in going through this, as the machine would persistantly bluescreen care of the audio driver. I'm glad I did not buy more machines, the level of support was below acceptable.

I'd like to shed tears for a 'British company', but if you just buy in re-badged equipment, offer ikky support, then its hard to really feel bad about it. However, I would echo what was said about their staff, helpful, and reasonable. But if the kit is from someone else, and your people can;t help the customer, being helpful and reasonable does not get me anywhere.

Yes the laptops Evesham sold were rebadged, but in the same way as Tier 1 laptops are made by third parties and rebadged by the likes of Dell.

I note that all complaints on here stem around the laptops, which even the most dedicated Evesham fan would admit had the odd issue. The desktops however were much better.

Very sad to see Evesham go like this. It was the staff that made the place.

I was offered (by phone tonight) a continuing warranty on an 'Evesham' LCD TV for £12.99 rip off or what? It's actually badged Tatung and 2 years old.