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I feel your pain. I can honestly say I have not had one, thats right, not one, instance where a tech-support center helped me in any way. The answer was either something that I already knew ("like can this do that? I don't see a way to do it."... "Oh, you can't, damn.") Or lead me to a conclusion that I had already come too. ("Hello? Yes, I have a faulty RAM SIMM, my I have an RMA?" ... (20 minutes later, putting SIMM back in, rebooting several times, mucking with the BIOS, etc.) "OK, the SIMM is faulty, RMA?" ...) The worst is dealing with Comcast on internet issues. I know FAR FAR more about networking than *anyone* I can contact at the other end, and it usually takes 15~20 minutes to get it through their drone-bee thick skulls that, if it were merely *my* end of things there would be no need for this phone call. Yet still, a day or two later, the guy comes to the house, determines that it is not, in fact, a problem with my setup and that there is something wrong with the wires outside of the house. Arrggg!!! all that said, 99% of computer problems are stupid little things about which most people have absolutely no clue.So, these places are good for joe-the-plumber who installed a virus, or is having problems getting their USB drives working. You know, stuff with which we wouldn't even see an issue. FYI: I have been buying motherboards and bundles from www.mwave.com for about 8~10 years now. Good prices and RAM/CPU/Motherboard bundles that get full burn-in. I have *never* had an issue with anything I've gotten from them, and I run my systems 24/7. The burn-in is the big thing, IMHO, once infant mortality is eliminated, most electronics will run for a thousand years. > From: "Rich Braun" <richb-RBmg6HWzfGThzJAekONQAQ at public.gmane.org> > Subject: Computer-vendor warranty departments - scrap them? > To: discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org > Message-ID: <33636.192.168.2.251.1226843316.squirrel-UBmCrHUNhTjk1uMJSBkQmQ at public.gmane.org> Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 > > 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 > > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org > http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss > > > End of Discuss Digest, Vol 13, Issue 18 > *************************************** >
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