Computer-vendor warranty departments - scrap them?

[Jack Coats]

Personally, I like 'white box' machines with generic parts that are 
swappable.

Warranties, extended or otherwise, are basically insurance policies.  
When purchasing servers for a bank
from IBM, we would purchase the longest warranty available, with 7x24x4 
hour response time as our standard.
It didn't mean it would be fixed in 4 hours, but at least it would start 
the process.  (the price really went up with
2 hour or better response!)  One time it took 5 days
to get a replacement disk drive that was under warranty,  but IBM 
couldn't get a commercial flight out of
where it was on some Florida key to get it to us.  If it didn't come out 
the next day a IBM corp jet was
scheduled to go pick it up.  It still was there Fedex with airport 
pickup or delivery to the office.  Sometimes
in Houston, they were flown in from San Antonio, Dallas, NYCity, or 
wherever.  But it WOULD GET
FIXED.  For them, the $600/system for 5 year warranty was worth it.  For 
my home box, buying a
new one (or parts) every other year to semi-rebuild it is cheaper and 
lets me 'upgrade'. 
It also gave us a good reason to get rid of old PURCHASED equipment.  
Out of warranty repair was
VERY expensive, and un-reliable.  It was all on a 'best efforts' basis, 
and there was little effort applied.

Is a warranty worth it? ... With or without warranty's, you pays your 
money and you takes your chances.

I buy extended warranty's on laptops, and big screen TVs, most other 
stuff, no.
Laptops because replacing a screen or mobo is almost impossible for the 
DIYer to deal with, otherwise save your
money and put it into your 'personal insurance fund', you keep to fix 
things when they go bad.  You will
probably be ahead in the long run.  That philosophy has worked OK for 
us.  As always, YMMV.

Rich Braun wrote:
> In April, I visited Microcenter's BYOPC section and bought a case,
> motherboard, CPU and RAM.  The motherboard's an Intel DG33TL and the CPU is an
> Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600.  It's turned into a saga; the outcome is a
> non-working doorstop.  Here is my story.
>
> Something on the board apparently went unstable after a few months of running
> as my main desktop (belately long after the sale, I looked at the Newegg.com
> reviews of this motherboard and learned that I'm not the only victim of this
> product).
>
> Being overly busy, I decided to give the Microcenter repair department a shot.
>  They had the box for about 3 or 4 working days last month.  They collected
> $70 "diagnostic fee" up front and didn't promise to handle warranty
> replacement.  On the last day, the tech picked up the repair ticket and called
> me to say he'd flashed the BIOS and everything checked out OK.  (In the
> written notes, he mentioned nothing about the BIOS:  it looks like a typical
> customer-is-idiot, must-not-have-checked-the-obvious writeup without any
> reference to a problem found.)  They charged me another $10 for "dressing the
> cables".
>
> Within 24 hours after I got the PC back, it crashed and scrambled the hard
> drive again.  (That was the same symptom I reported:  it takes a heckuva
> failure to cause Linux to overwrite the filesystem the way this thing did.) 
> During my 4th attempt to rebuild the system, the board finally failed utterly
> with a POST code E7.  Still being busy with work, I put the whole thing aside
> for a few weeks and then this week decided to give it another shot, this time
> by calling Intel.
>
> The Intel warranty line (not an 800 number, only open 5 days a week) led me to
> a tech who inquired about the BIOS version number.  0293, I read off to him
> (vintage October 2007).  Oh, you want to be running 0497, he said.  (Their
> website cautions you not to flash the BIOS unless you've got an explicit
> reason.)  I asked him for a reason, he said it's what he recommends trying. 
> OK, I said, I'll give it a shot tomorrow.
>
> It's *very* difficult to follow any of the *five* sets of instructions for
> different methods of flashing an Intel board, in particular when the board
> fails POST.  I suppose I could call them back--during work hours M-F--and have
> them walk me through it.
>
> But I JUST WANT A NEW MOTHERBOARD.  How difficult should it be?  I already
> found a $50 replacement for this thing on Newegg.  The old one's cost me $130
> plus $80 repair costs plus at least 10 hours of effort.  Factoring in a token
> amount for my time, the true-blue Intel board cost about 10 times as much as a
> "lesser" Gigabyte/MSI replacement.  At the moment I'm wrestling with the
> decision to yank the processor/memory out of the failed unit and going with
> the replacement paid for out of pocket.  If I do that, that's the end of my
> efforts to diagnose anything else with the DG33TL.
>
> No wonder America is the throw-away society.  It's almost never worth trying
> to fix anything, even if it's only a couple months old and covered by
> warranty.  If you're pressed for time, is a warranty worth anything at all?
>
> -rich
>
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