TheNightTerror on 20/5/2006 at 06:10
I feel like a god damned attention whore for starting two threads so close together, but May seems to have good luck in store for me. :D I finally got another long standing problem dealt with.
Now, for anyone who hasn't had to put up with my bitching, I've been fighting with Future Shop for a good 9 months now to get my laptop replaced. The DC jack had one hell of a crack in it, bad enough to screw over the modem, and the headphone jack was damaged. The store said I deliberately damaged it, and, up until a few days ago, refused to replace it under the warranty, like they were supposed to after it had been gone for 2 months.
It turned out my mom was heading through the city the laptop was in just a few days after they came to their senses, which happened to be today, and we could get the replacement. And, to say the least, we got a hell of a laptop for a bargain after all this. :cheeky:
They offered us $1,455 towards any laptop in the store, after we rejected the $1,199 laptop they offered us, and they were reminded about the bullshit we'd put up over the last 9 months. At this point, I was madly in love with the most expensive, and by far the most impressive laptop they had in stock.
It's an HP DV8000T, with an Intel Core Duo T2300 processor, clocked at 1.66 GHz. The video card by far sold me on the baby; it has a nVIDIA Go Geforce 7400, with 256 megs of video memory. 128 is dedicated to it, another 128 is shared with the regular memory, but there's a whole gig of that as well. And the hard drive will be a welcome change from my original laptop's; this one has 160. :cool:
The original laptop had a Pentium 4 2.8 gigahertz processor, 448 megs of memory, a ATI Radeon IGP 345M, (a stripped Radeon 7000) which had 64 megs of memory. The hard drive weighed in at a pitiful 32 gigabytes, as well.
With the money they gave us for the trooper, we only had to pay just under $250 for the laptop we did get. :cool:
I couldn't take the laptop home today, since it was a demo, and needed to be scanned for viruses before we left. It would've taken 3 hours, and my bus home left an hour from when I found that out, so I had to say farewell for the moment. Back home now, and I can't wait for Tuesday, to say the least. :cool:
Aja on 20/5/2006 at 07:39
If I had a dollar for every hour spent fighting with FutureShop/BestBuy over warranty issues, I might have enough money to replace all the shit that they refused to. :mad:
Sounds like a good laptop. I hope you bought the extended warranty :sly:
descenterace on 20/5/2006 at 10:01
I am so damn glad that I've never had problems with warranties. Mind you, I buy most of my stuff online, and dabs.com responds to every RMA by simply replacing or refunding (whichever I ask for) with no questions asked. Either that or everything I've tested and found faulty also failed in their labs, which must make me unique...
That is a very nice spec. One of my housemates seems to collect laptops (she had four a couple of months ago) but her gaming machine wasn't anywhere near that spec.
shadows on 20/5/2006 at 13:39
Nice to hear you won your fight with them TNT. tis' true what they say, once they have your money, they don't give a damn.
OrbWeaver on 20/5/2006 at 13:43
I am always amazed to hear stories of how consumers in the US get treated.
Although poor customer service exists in the UK as well, for the most part retailers just honour the warranty without questions. I have never heard of anybody being accused of deliberately breaking something they tried to return (in fact I have heard of some shops that have given a refund for something which was returned without a receipt or any evidence that it was sold by them in the first place, just to avoid unecessary trouble).
ZylonBane on 20/5/2006 at 13:53
Quote Posted by TheNightTerror
I feel like a god damned attention whore for starting two threads so close together
Trust your feelings.
TheNightTerror on 20/5/2006 at 23:24
@Aja -- it's kind of funny, but this is the first time ever that we've had trouble with Future Shop. They've replaced headphones with duct tape on the weak spots on the cords, my first laptop had pop spilled across the keyboard and was dropped too many times to count, but they repaired it, no questions asked. :weird:
And yes, we got the extended warranty. :laff: With the entropy field that seems to exist in my room, it would be idiotic not to. Although, that big of a laptop seems like it'd be a tank. (It's so big that the god damn keyboard has a number pad. :eek:)
@OrbWeaver -- Aja and I are both Canadians, so we aren't free, either. ;) This is the first time I've been accused of deliberately breaking something, and we weren't even trying to return it in the beginning, we just wanted it repaired. :weird: And they even repaired the same problem a few months before, but obviously it didn't hold. :sweat:
Aja on 21/5/2006 at 08:57
Actually my original statement was somewhat misleading. Future Shop has generally been quite good about warranty coverage. I fucked up the bios in my family's very first computer years ago, and they gave us a much better one (Pentium II to Pentium III) for 300 bucks. Later that week the computer went on sale, and we got an additional hundred off. My dad's Future Shop laptop broke one time, and they gave him a used replacement, which worked quite well, despite arriving packed to the gills with porn. Also replaced a DS with one stuck pixel, though I doubt they'd do that any more.
It's Best Buy who's given the most headaches; if you buy the extended warranty and have a problem, you can get your foot in the door, but if you don't buy it, they won't give you the time of day. Quick search should reveal a thread I made about a year ago, I won't recap, but I will say that you must HOUND them to get proper customer service. Also, be sure to read the very fine print in any contract you sign.
Best Buy recently bought Future Shop, so my animosity toward the former is naturally transfered to the latter, although I haven't had any specific trouble with it yet.
liquidfear on 22/5/2006 at 06:14
Quote:
they gave him a used replacement, which worked quite well,
despite especially since it arrived packed to the gills with porn
Fixed for ya. ;) Thank me later.
The only problem's I've ever really had with premature breakage on anything was my pioneer stereo (Bought at future shop, I do believe), which I bought for my '91 cavaliar. It worked fine until my battery died and I boosted the car. Ever since then, it hasn't played a single CD; just spins it around and spits it back out. Of course, this all had to happen after the warranty expired. I've checked around, and still haven't found why it happened (did the boosting do it?), what would need to be repaired (Laser burnt out?) or if it should be replaced.
But, not to throw the thread off course. Congrats TNT. I know you've been fighting this a long time now. :cheeky:
TheNightTerror on 22/5/2006 at 08:11
@Aja -- seems to me like Future Shop's warranty coverage definitely took a major dive after Best Buy bought them out. The first time the laptop went in was before it happened, and this latest time was after.
@liquidfear -- it sounds like either the lens is fucked or it's not able to spin the disk fast enough. :weird: Whatever it was probably did happen because of the boost, maybe it wasn't wired in properly. Remind me about that next time I talk to you, maybe I can help with ideas.
