by Jonny | Sep 10, 2013 | Tips & Advice
As you can see from the picture above, my laptop recently broke and I had to pay out £60 to get my laptop repaired. I work in Central London at Tottenham Court Road near Oxford Street. This area is renowned for being expensive, so this would have been the last place to go to get my laptop repaired. I, however, had no choice but to go to Oxford Street as I work near there and any other alternative, like going to Stratford for example, would have been too difficult and monotonous.
What did I do to get my laptop repaired?
Oxford Street has many computer or laptop repair shops and the fact there are so many of these types of shops allows you to pick the best shops and this allows you to not have to rely on a single quote and you can shop around to see who will offer you the best price.
I think I visited around 3 computer repair shops and had offers that ranged from £40 to £100. Of course, the thing you shouldn’t do is give in to the first offer that you find. I almost made that mistake until the idea of going next door or down the road to another repair shop came to mind.
The first quote
I first got an offer for £40 and the only reason I didn’t take that offer was because he said he’d fix it by tomorrow and he would not be able to fix the cause or rather he would only fix the immediate problem. That was simply soldering the wire that became detached from the charger port. Instead of paying someone to do this I could have done it all by myself and bought the equipment to do it. I respectfully declined and said I’d look elsewhere for a cheaper quote and for someone that would do an all-rounder in fixing the whole problem meaning that I would not get persistent issues in the future.
The second quote
This is the funny yet disturbing one. I walked in and I immediately asked the person behind the counter if they did laptop repairs, he said yes and referred me to another guy behind another counter. I went over to him and asked him whether he would charge me for simply looking at my laptop’s issue. He said yes, and I tried explaining to him that if I showed him the issue that it wouldn’t take too long and that I would choose his shop to fix my problem if he thought he could repair it. Instead, he kept insisting that I pay £50 upfront for him to look at it and that if he could repair it, he would only charge me £40 to repair the issue, bringing the total amount that would’ve been paid to £90. I said no, and then he started going full-retard by telling me how many customers that he had yesterday. He was almost trying to imply that he didn’t need me. Either way, I’m so glad that I didn’t pick him.
The last and best quote
I thought I’d save the best till last and this was definitely the most straightforward out of the laptop repair shops that I went to. First of all, he addressed things like a professional. While the others immediately stated how much I was going to pay, the guy in this shop asked me to look at what needed repairing and then quoted me a price. This is basic sales 101, which the other repair shops disregarded altogether. It seems that they purely wanted the money and made it quite obvious which is a huge mistake on their part. It’s the reason why I chose this shop over the others.
A big shout out to this store! Apparently their store is called “WORLD” and I don’t think they have a website; otherwise, I would have linked to them.
And finally, my laptop is now working and it seems they done a good job on fixing the issue at hand. I will still have to buy superglue to glue down the corner part where they had to replace the charger port, so they haven’t fully fixed it. However, I’m just glad that I now have a laptop that is in full working order. I’m still working on saving up for a new laptop — that is however work in progress.
The lesson here: (tldr)
- Don’t take the first quote and definitely don’t buy into a sales pitch.
by Jonny | Jul 3, 2013 | Travel, Updates
There are perks with living in every country, but then there are general things that you discover that make working somewhere a pain in the butt. When it comes to working/interning in London, the transport aspect of life goes downhill once you start traveling at peak times. Just imagine a train packed with people, with the train stuttering at many points, and constantly stopping at different stations for a 30-40 minute duration; and because of the fact there are so many people, there are no seats, expect cramped conditions and definitely don’t expect the air conditioning to actually do its job. On that last point, I actually questioned myself as to whether I should bring my coat to work. It’s abysmal, and there is probably nothing that can be done to fix this situation because packed trains mean profit and profit is obviously the number one priority for Transport for London. I just don’t see people taking alternatives seriously and I guess a lot of people have adapted to that type of life of being packed into trains like cattle!
Please, London, Transport for London, make the trains bigger, wider, longer, and even add more trains if feasible. I need a rest after a long day’s work! 😮 If anything, put a decent air conditioning system on-board the trains. It really gets hot when the train is packed.
Anyways, I haven’t really updated this blog in a while and my most recent post was reviewing my first month with giffgaff and the fact that you should probably choose them over any other provider if you decide to visit London or if you are a resident. To move on from this little advertisement and to tell you more about why I’m using the underground system more frequently than before, I’m actually interning with a company in central London. I’m traveling from zone 3 to zone 1 every weekday, and working from 9:00am-5:30pm. I’ve decided I need the experience, if anything, if I ever want to get into web development. (My long term goal) Additionally, it looks good on my CV and I’m hoping I can learn a trick or two working at this mysterious place, which I probably shouldn’t and won’t name.
Here are a few quick pictures I took of Tottenham Court Road, outside one of the 3 underground exits:
Pictures inside the station:
A crazy, but true story while I was traveling on the underground
It was a Saturday night and I believe there was a gay parade occasion going on in SOHO. I’m basically going to Tottenham Court Road to check out where I’ll be interning for 4 weeks. To cut to the chase, I was basically on the train and when it stopped at Liverpool Street a group of drunk people got onto the train and sat around the free seats around me. They then started singing, as drunk people do, and then, out of nowhere, one of them takes his friend’s shoes off and to my amazement, he throws his shoes out the window, one by one. 😮 At this point I was shocked and I’m thinking I need to get the hell out of here, in-case they do the same to my shoes. 😀 Anyways, while all this is occurring, there is this guy just randomly laughing for no reason. Needless to say, because of this constant laughing everyone in that train car is either laughing or smirking. I was directly in the middle of all these drunkards and it’s seriously the funniest thing I have witnessed. I wish I had recorded the whole thing, and I think it would have gone viral had I uploaded to YouTube. Never again will I miss an opportunity like that, although I will probably never have that same opportune moment. 🙁
by Jonny | May 12, 2013 | Updates
I recently started a few new blogs and I used an automated installer to install WordPress via cPanel. However, when I created the site I noticed a few issues had arisen and that had made it impossible for me to login to “wp-admin” and “wp-login.php”, so I wondered what could have gone wrong, as every time when I tried to access those URLs, I encountered “Not found”, even though the directory does indeed exist. I knew it was a .htaccess issue, so I looked at one of my older blogs where I have none of these issues and copied my .htaccess file into the directory of my new site.
I copied this .htaccess:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>\
# END WordPress
… into my blog’s new directory and the problem was fixed.
If you have this problem then this is most likely the fix!
by Jonny | Jun 3, 2012 | Updates
I wrote an article about this around two weeks ago, and website security is paramount, especially so when leaving your website unattended for a while. I did this an faced the consequences of having my sites hacked/cracked and I regret neglecting my website in such a way, as it was such a pain to sort this mess out.
I lost a lot of my Google rankings in search results, which hit my traffic big-time, however considering I don’t worry about that much it isn’t much of a problem. However, for others who won’t know how to fix an infected site, it is better to totally re-install whatever script you’ve got installed. For example, most of my websites run on WordPress, and when my sites became infected as I hadn’t updated the latest version, the best thing to do was totally re-install my WordPress installation. – This takes care of the following:
- You can be at ease and know that whatever virus which has infected your site has been removed. So as long as you have totally replaced all your files, other than your images in your WordPress installation.
- You get rid of any back doors the hacker may have injected into your website because of any script vulnerability.
Trust me on this, don’t neglect your website. It is much easier to first take care of your website rather than have to worry about it later, as it will become much harder to ‘fix’ the longer you leave it.
by Jonny | May 20, 2012 | Updates
I’ve recently just experienced something which has inundated my experience as a person who runs websites that are online. Security is a big thing and as soon as you let your guard down, there are people out there who will go out of their way to find ways to exploit websites which haven’t been updated. i.e. Easy targets
Since I’ve been working full-time, my main website armour.ws faced a few attacks from people trying to upload .html files which contained phishing websites, mainly or only to do with banks.
I first noticed this when my web host informed me and when Google also informed me. I’m not surprised at-all if they’ve penalised my website. But all that matters is that I’ve secured my website.
I’ve totally re-installed WordPress on that site, backed up everything again, looked at the MySQL database for any anomalies and I’ve started anew with the design to ensure that it wasn’t the theme/design causing any cracks in terms of security. I’ve also installed a few firewall scripts for WordPress, essentially a tool which will scan all my files for any anomalies.
I just let my guard down, stopped updating my website and suddenly I find myself being attacked. Now things should be okay, but I’ll say something, it would have been a lot easier to keep my site updated from the start. I spent most of the day making modifications, backing up, optimizing the MySQL database and changing a few aspects and fixing a few things on the website itself.
I will also stress, as would other experienced webmasters, MAKE BACKUPS constantly. You never know when you’ll need a backup to help you out of a disastrous situation.