Excellent service from Comet

I bought a Sagem PVR6200T Freeview PVR back in August from Comet in Greenwich.

The device was OK at best, it was noisy and a bit slow to respond sometimes, never coped well with playback of something while recording something else and often just crashed randomly. This was after a software upgrade that took away the repeatable crashes and reboots leaving just the random ones.

Most annoyingly it's only means of upgrade was Over The Air broadcasts so even though a upgrade was out to fix some of my problems I couldn't download it and fix them, I had to wait for Sagem to schedule a OTA again.

Night before last it's HDD packed up - much ticking and retry sounding noises at bootup and it never displayed anything on the screen.

I immediately thought it is going to be hell to replace this thing, probably involve me sending it back to Sagem myself, being without a PVR for months and then getting a refurb version of the same crap back. Had a look on the Comet site and they said one can just bring it back to them for repairs - so still much waiting?

I drove to the store I got it from - Comet Greenwich about 10 mins from me - and put it on the counter with a very quick explanation of what was going on. The guy behind the desk just looked at it to ensure all the bits where there and asked me if I wanted the same type again or a different one for replacement? I was shocked it was totally painless, no hassles, no questions asked, just go pick a new one.

So I looked at the various options and settled for a Humax PVR-9200T - had to pay the 20 pound price difference - my first impressions are that this is a great bit of kit. It's fast, the UI is much prettier, it supports upgrading via RS232 port and OTA. It has a USB port and some software that lets you download recorded video to a PC for viewing. It also has double the storage of the old Sagem and a 2 year warranty.

So major kudos to Comet for getting customer service right, totally unexpected and unique in my experience with high street electronics places. I've bought many things from them in the past this is the first one thats broken, but it does inspire confidence.