Hopefully someone has some experience here. I recently made a claim for my laptop which was kindly dumped on with juice by my 2 year old (he was giving it the smack down with the tommy tippy cup). Never made a claim in my life.It's completely dead, will not power up, kaput. My policy includes accidental damages to computers with £50 excess, New for new replacement. Never made a claim in my life. My knackered laptop is/was 5 years old, HP C2D/Geforce 8M/17" with all the bells and whistles. Cost £899 back then, Served me well up until it was drowned. The insurance people are sending a courier to pick up the old beast and will advise me if it can be repaired first, then replaced if repairing is out of the question, Which I imagine it will be. My question is, What sort of laptop would I be looking at getting back in return, Just as a rough guide. Cheers all.
In my experience, they would replace it with a decent-ish model to the tune of about £400 as laptop costs have come down considerably over the last five years. In some instances, they might agree to send out a cheque for a given sum based on a quote that you find for yourself through online or a trip to a retail store. I would make a case to say that you used your laptop for some hefty photo editing and that you would expect to get something with some grunt under the hood. However, it's how you place your case with the insurers.
I've seen different things from insurance companies - a) Cost of the machine at time of purchase. b) Final cost of the machine. c) Replaced with equivalent spec regardless of cost. I think b was more of an in house insurance, but I added it regardless. Not sure as to what you mean by all the bells and whistles, I can't imagine Blu-ray on it, and if I'm honest, if it's a nvidia 8000 series laptop card, i'm surprised it's lasted this long. Try and find something specific that might still be rare on it, and push that point across. 17" screen might add a little bit to the value they give you. Throw the 'decent graphics card' point at them too, argue that AMDs apus aren't dedicated - unless you don't mind an APU - gaming + photo editing as IamJudd mentioned too.
I had a laptop replaced but it was on the business insurance for the shop (I was running the till on it and someone spilt a tray of coffees. Now they in the first instance looked for an identical model and then proposed somethign they thought was about right. However I rejected their proposed replacement on the grounds that it didn't match the original spec on certain points, even though being perhaps better overall). On that basis they eventually gave up and offered the purchase price. SO whatever they propose you shoudl demand that none of it's specs are weaker that what you had. Eg.g Size of screen Resolution CPU speed RAM Graphics card Memory (quite possibly a stupid measure but they might take it) Bluetooth Keyboard backlighting etc etc.
Hiscox paid me cash to the original value + full original cost of the SSD I stuck in it. But then again, Hiscox cost £££ to begin with... I think most insurers just send you a pc world / currys voucher for about what they think a replacement is worth - if you've got the receipt that will help a lot.
the funny thing is they could have met my speceasily on dell but they have to find one on the lists of their preferred supplier.
Thanks for the advise all, Much appreciated. The lappy is DV9700 series, The board being PM65 w/ 8600MGT 512MB w/HDMI which was a newer revision replacement (out of warranty), And has lasted all this time. T7500, 4GB PC2-6400, 17" Screen, Dual HDD's (30GB SSD & 160GB 7200RPM), 802.11n/Bluetooth 4.0 upgrade, TV tuner expresscard & remote. The audio outputs had dual headphone sockets/SPDIF. I think I will push the dual HDD's, 17" screen and discrete nvidia graphics, I did tell them I used it for gaming. The most recent HP lappy I could find that is cheap and similar is this: http://www.ebuyer.com/419544-hp-pavilion-g7-laptop-c4v70ea-abu No dual hard drives or discrete graphics though. Anyone know a laptop that has dual HDD's?
Not seen any dual HDD laptops, sorry. But definately use that, tell them than the SSD was an OS drive and not for storage because we all know that writing lots to an SSD will wear them out really fast Hopefully that'll push them to something more expensive. Just think up valid arguments for each point telling them it's not equivalent spec if it doesn't do what it was intended to.
In my own experience it appears they don't have a clue what is a good spec or not. I had my entire man cave stolen a few years ago (it still scars me to this day) and when I listed all of the components I used to put my main rig together, they just didn't understand it. In the end, it worked out beautifully as they used the PC World Business prices for the components and at the time they were ripping people off so I benefited from the high prices. I actually went back to them with prices from Scan and Aria as the guilt set in but they ignored what I sent them and gave me the PCWorld prices. They even gave me full value for my Compaq TC1000 Tablet which was 5 years old at the time, not working and under a box on the shelf. They tried to give me PC World voucher/credit but I insisted on a cheque since the quality of components were not available through PC World. Stick to your guns on the spec as they will find something equivalent today i.e Dual HDD's
Just to repeat. Stick the claim in normally, see what they offer, if it doesn't meet all the specs of the old one, ask them to look again. Eventually they will offer you the purchase price (assuming you have to original sale details somewhere).
Well that went semi well. The initially offered me this: http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Toshiba_SATELLITE_PRO_C870-1E2_PSCBBE-00J018EN/version.asp I went with this: http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_V3-571G_Windows_8_Core_i3_Laptop_-_Black_NX.RZJEK.012/version.asp So I went from 2008 HP Pavillion DV9700T to 2012 Acer Aspire V3-571G C2D T7500 to Core i3-3110M (can upgrade to i5 or i7 with new PSU) 4GB DDR2 to 6GB DDR3 (plan on 8GB) 8600MGT 512mb to GT630M 1GB & HD 4000 Optimus 30GB SSD & 160GB HDD to 500GB HDD (added 120GB SSD and optical drive bay for swapping 500GB) 17" 1600x900 LCD to 15" 1366x768 LED Intel 965PM to Intel HM77 Windows 7 x64 to Windows 8 x64 2.0mp to 1.3mp webcam Also gained USB 3.0, PCI-e 2.0, DX11, BT 4.0, 802.11n and way better power saving. All for £50! Cheers for the advice all Rep dished!
