Firewire gets extinguished

Further to your ‘Whatever happened to Firewire?’ question (Problems Solved, Issue 477, page 69), you managed to touch on one of my favourite topics of irritation. During its brief dalliance with Firewire, Apple became obsessed with it. For a long time, it was only possible to clone your computer’s hard drive on a Firewire external drive, because Apple Mac’s operating system (OSX) only allowed you to boot the drive from a Firewire device and not from a USB drive.

Consequently, many dedicated Mac users (like myself) have collected a lot of Firewire peripherals – in my case two external hard drives and a CD-ROM drive. These now require expensive adapters to remain useful, and further adapters to allow the connection of a Firewire 400 item to a Firewire 800 socket.

Since then, of course, Apple has moved on via Thunderbolt (1 and 2) to USB Type-c. I’m a huge Apple admirer, but why can’t they standardise on connectivity? Clearly it is planned obsolescence, as described by Ken Rigsby (The Final Straw, Issue 479). Incidentally, Ken, I have just replaced my still serviceable ipad 2 with an ipad Air 2. It’s only because Apple fans have deep pockets that Apple can get away with this policy. quite involved) ‘solutions’ worked. I started the process of reverting to Windows 7, when suddenly an onscreen message appeared offering to ring me ‘within one minute’. True to their word, a Microsoft tech guy rang me up. I gave him access to my machine and sat back, thinking what a great service. We were in phone contact as he worked. The first sign of trouble was when he seemed totally unaware that this incompatibility problem existed and his solution (without looking at my version of Windows 10), was to start deleting my programs with the intention of reloading them as they ‘were not compatible with Windows 1010’. Firefox and VLC not cocompatible? Really?! We lost connection twice (hhis end not mine), before lolosing connection entirely. Alalthough they had my number, I received no call back.ack. I was reluctant to contact Microsoft again because I wouldn’t get through to the same tech. Now I’m left with a machine that is in a worse state than when I contacted the ‘help’ desk. Such is life...

AJim Burfield

The refund is hardly generous, but whether it’s fair is difficult to ascertain. Under the rules of the Sale of Goods Act, Tesco is within its rights to offer Jim a refund rather than attempt a repair or give him a replacement. But we’re not sure why the customer service rep said Tesco was working to the terms and conditions of The Sale of Goods Act when it reached its decision on the amount of the refund. We realise the refund can be on a pro rata basis (meaning it takes into account the use Jim’s had from the system), but there’s no mention of the calculation used to produce the refund amount.

It would seem that Tesco only expects the system to last around two and a half years. On that basis it has calculated that a 55 per cent reduction for 15 months use is fair. The problem is that only a judge in the small claims court could decide that Tesco is being stingy and award Jim more. While he isn’t entitled to a full refund we’d hope that Tesco would make a more generous offer so we’ve contacted the retailer to see what it says and will update you with the outcome.