Medion/ATI card (Re: WARNING ABOUT DABS)

In article <bg5a4u$l37$1$8300dec7@news.demon.co.uk>, asc99c@hotmail.com
says...
> Tell me about it. My graphics card from there is broken, it's sat in a box
> on my table waiting for a response from the customer support team, waiting 4
> days now. A while back I was going to do an RMA but it wasn't quite
> broken - just unstable, and they told me 6-8 weeks for it. At the time I
> didn't have a spare card so it was just a case of put up with it. Not
> buying from them again.
>
I have a faulty ATI Radeon 9600TX 128Mb card which was supplied as part of a
Medion Titanium MD8008 PC, and it's faulty because it's generating a pattern
of RF-style interference over the picture on the s-video output.

I've switched off everything in the room, in turn, that can possibly cause
such interference (and a load of things that wouldn't) and no joy. Then
someone replied in the ATI ng with their report about how the same thing
happened with their All In Wonder card and it's something ATI are trying to
keep hush-hush about.

Anyway, after weeks of faffing about with Medion about trying to organise a
callout from an engineer to replace the card (yes, a whole callout to replace
a mere graphics card - what a waste of a day off work!), they called to say...
they're out of stock and will call me when they're back in. Grrrrr!

I asked Medion about trying to avoid a callout and replacing the card myself
but they'd only do that if I sent the card back first before they send the
replacement(how the hell can I use the PC to read their emails if I do that?!)

So, and I've x-posted this to the ATI ng in the hope someone can help, can
anyone please tell me what my rights are in the case of how long I should wait
for ATI's engineers to call back to get the card in stock? They say it's "on
order" but that's no guarantee of it coming in stock in the next week or two.

I know when there's a faulty item that you have to give a company at least a
chance to repair it, but what do you do when they don't have the stock with
which to repair it?

TIA,
--

Dom Robinson Gamertag: DVDfever email: dom at dvdfever dot co dot uk
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