Can I get a refund for faulty secondhand laptop?

QTen months ago I bought a refurbished Dell Windows 7 desktop PC from ebay seller Tradetrading ( www.ebay.co.uk/usr/ tradetrading). The laptop has now completely died. I only paid £50, but it wasn’t used much or connected to the internet because it’s a spare for my bedroom. Tradetrading is fobbing off my phone calls. Can you help?

We like goodwill gestures because they show companies can be flexible. But often companies use the term to describe something that, actually, they are bound to do by law. It gives the erroneous impression that the company is doing the customer a favour. The latest company guilty of this is Three. As we reported in Issue 502, it sold reader Peter Gilmore a ZTE V7 Blade phone that developed a fault within two months. Three told Peter to return it to ZTE for repair, which he did, but this didn’t fix the phphone. At this point Three demonstrated a shocking igignorance of consumer law. It wanted to send the phphone for another repair, seemingly not realising that under the 2015 Consumer Rights Act companies can offer only one repair before refunding or replreplacing. Since then, Three has given Peter a nenew phone, but claimed it was a gogoodwill gesture, maintaining that he wasn’t legally entitled to one. Ththis is nonsense. So while Peter is hahappy with his phone (assuming it dodoesn’t suffer from the same fault), wewe’re confused by Three’s stance. We’ve contacted the company to get confirmation that it understands the new one-repair rule.