Hi there,

I have sent a laptop off to tesco insurance, and they have proclaimed it beyond econimical repair. It was a Sony NR21Z, and They have based the calim on a current model of the FW21L

I have been offered £700 worth of vouchers to spend at currys/pc world, even though I bought it at the sony centre. If i dont want the vouchers it would be £500 cheque.

They have also said that they will keep the old laptop, and if I want the hard drive back I have to pay for it.

The only problem with the laptop was the screen. The rest of the laptop works fine(I checked by hooking it upto an external monitor).

Questions:

1. Can they really offer me vouchers for the full amount, but less in a cheque? I really dont want to buy a laptop from either of those places.

2. Can they really keep the old laptop?

3. Can they really charge me £30 to return the old hard drive?

Any other advice would be appriciated.

Thanks

If an insurance company pays out on an item, it effectively buys the item from you.

For instance if you wrote a car off then in settling the insurance claim the insurance company buys the car from you.

However you should be given opportunity to recover personal items from the wreck, which in your case would be the personal data on the hard drive.

The legality of the cheque/voucher scheme may be covered in that they would probably claim that the value of the laptop is actually £500 (I do not make that valuation - I do not know) and that they are giving you an extra payment in consideration of taking vouchers rather than cash.

Personally I would pay the £30 for the drive (you could possibly ask for them to return the laptop to you while you consider your options and then send return it to them once you have decided, but that would probably cost you more than £30 in postage and it would massively complicate matters)

I would also accept the vouchers and go and buy another laptop from currys or PC world.

this is probably not what you want to hear, but these are my thoughts.

Hmmm.. this is an interesting one. Maybe someone with more claims experience will be able to offer there opinion on this specific point:

Although the hard disk drive, as a physical object, has a value (the insurance company will call this salvage), and thus within a 'total loss' claim they are entitled to ask you for money on this, I do not believe that the same can be said for the data stored on the hard disk drive.

I believe this data would have a very different "value" - for example it might have the only copy of your wedding photos it might have, or it could be full of mp3s that you bought from iTunes, or whatever.

I'm thinking that you couldn't really give a crap about the hard disk drive if you got a new laptop, but what you do care about is the data stored on it. However you cannot get at your data unless you pay the £30 to get the HDD back.

Now the point of insurance is to return you to a condition you were at before the claim was made. This would certainly (in my mind) indicate that the new laptop should have the data on it. Because of this I think that the insurance company should replace the data, and that they should pay for the costs of this.

Anybody else have some thoughts on this?

Until you have accepted their offer of payment then the computer and the information contained on it still belongs to you. Ask them to send it back while you decide what you would like to do. Retreive all the information from the hard drive and then send it back. It won't cost anywhere near £30 to post a laptop.

Then you will have all the infomation and £700 worth of vouchers. You can get a fantastic laptop for £700.

The truth is - and admittedly with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight - is that the laptop should never have left your possession in the first place without all your personal data being copied.

If the hard drive had simply failed, you would have lost the lot. Regular back-ups are a must; most people don't realise that until it is too late. Never have only one copy of anything digital.

To be fair - And believe me I Know the point about backing up - but not everyone would be able to back up data from a machine that didnt have a working screen...

(some people wouldnt know how to back up data from a computer WITH a working screen)

your point about backing up is very well made though and as you say - there should have been regular backups while the computer was working.