Foscam

OK, so my external webcam packed up. I suspect the reset button, but it is still under the 2 year warranty, so I have contacted them to see what we can do. I have heard some pretty bad things about Foscam and their customer service, but I am prepared to give them the benefit of doubt and note things here as they go along.

Email sent via their website on Sunday 26th April and I am writing this on Tuesday 28th and so far, not a dicky bird.

Update: 4 May.  Nothing heard by Sunday 3 May, which was a week after my initial contact with Foscam, so I fired off an email to them. This resulted in a reply! This morning, I got a message back asking me to email their "replacement" address - which, ominously, is a foscam.us email address - i.e in the States rather than the UK. Lets hope the replacement - assuming I get one - will be a UK thing rather than having to ship the old one to the States and wait for a replacement from there!

More to come.....

4 May
And indeed, already the "passing the buck" competition seems to be in action!  The .us address emailed back asking me to contact "gadgetfreakz" who are a Foscam address and I have fired off an email to them. Their website seems to mention 1 year warranties - but my cam specifically states 2 years. They had better not mess me about or they may regret it. I am pretty familiar with how to deal with these "ah, but our warranty is different.." arguments. My friends at Trading Standards love something to get their teeth into. My previous life as a Civil Servant helps quite a bit at times :)

Keep Watching this space!

11 May  and I have heard nothing, so fired off another polite email,
mentioning that I haven't heard from them and re-stating what has gone wrong.
Next email wil be a lot less polite if they haven't replied - and I will start mentioning trading standards....

15 May - Still nothing, so another reasonably polite email sent. I have no idea what this lot consider to be customer service, but this is not it people!
Will ring them on Monday if no reply, then we shall see what happens!

Update - 15 May again.  Got a reply this evening from Foscam, apologising for the slow reply, but saying they had been exhibiting at the NEC this week - which is fair enough I reckon.
Anyway, they advised me to reboot the cam by holding in the reset button for 45 seconds etc - but I have done all that. They also advised me to review the returns policy on their website and provided a link.  Sadly the link to the warranty returns bit was dead and gave me a stylised 404 page. Not a great advert for their service, but hey ho.  So I sent an email, explaining that I had done the rest already and that the website linky was dead. I asked what to do now - and, as of 6pm on Monday 18 May, no reply.

Keep watching folks!

Sooo.....today is the 23rd May and still heard nothing from FoscamUK. I shall drop them a friendly reminder on Monday. Not really very good are they?

26 May and I have sent them another email. They really need to start listening to their customers. I shall send an email to Foscam HQ next.  Then off to Trading Standards. This is getting silly.

Program specific crap

Well, I have allowed myself to fall foul of the most basic of things - using a program to create files which then is "updated" and no longer reads the old version - and my backup versions seem to have missed this.

Kword was a KDE app which was the default office type app for documents. Koffice was the overall package, but one could install various parts without others - so you could have Korganiser or whatever it was called without the Kword part.

So, all those Kword files I made back years ago?  I can't open the damn things!  My KDE distros - e.g Yoper - don't have the Kword bit - and my older distros - e.g Mandrake 9 or RedHat 7 - refuse to play in VirtualBox.

Abiword is supposed to open old KWord files - but not these ones :(

Moral?  Stick to basic formats. These are nothing more than simple documents - no clever formatting or embedded crap - just text. But they *might* contain something of interest....

Bugger


Update:  I have been able to install a copy of SuSE 9 which I actually *bought* years ago. A very good distro in its time it was too. Anyway, that had a version of Kword which allowed me to review those files and sort things.