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"In het verleden behaalde resultaten bieden geen garanties voor de toekomst"
About this blog

These are the ramblings of Matthijs Kooijman, concerning the software he hacks on, hobbies he has and occasionally his personal life.

Most content on this site is licensed under the WTFPL, version 2 (details).

Questions? Praise? Blame? Feel free to contact me.

My old blog (pre-2006) is also still available.

See also my Mastodon page.

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So much for MSI support....

I was going to write a nice piece about MSI support here, as soon as I got my notebook back from MSI. About their nice service (pick up and return with UPS!) even though they are a little slow-ish. About their nice battery warranty (minimal 80% of capacity after a year) and their flexibility in applying that warranty (I was a few days too late, technically) But, I've decided not too.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, my notebook HD broke in the first place. Not a nice thing to do, though I should probably blame WD for not making HD's that can sustain repeated writes resulting from hibernation in the same area of the disk.

It could also be because it took them nearly a week to respond to my service request when I complained about a bad HD (with complete smart status and error logs to back up my case). All I got back was a UPS label, but I reckoned it took them a while to fully read through my case and decide what to do with it. As it turns out now, it seems they didn't even read it and just needed 6 days to send me a UPS label.


Might it be because, when I called to inform how long it would take, they told me they were not going to replace my hard drive? Their hard drive testing tools did not say it was defective, so they were gonna send my notebook back with the old drive still in it. Might they have thought I was imagining things? That the drive was not broken, but I was trying to rip them off to get a new one? Why didn't they just call to ask, see if I could supply some extra information? "It's policy not to communicate about warranty requests", they returned. How nice!

I tried Politely explaining that while the hard drive does not give structural read errors, it does break every now and then, throwing away data in the process. The warranty guy was quite friendly and promised they would replace the hard drive after all, based on my explanation. That made them appear very flexible and friendly, it was just that my explanation was also in the first email I sent them. They must have thrown it away, I suppose. Probably part of the "not communicating" policy.

Perhaps it is because, when I phoned them two days later (Wednesday) why my notebook wasn't delivered yet, they told me they had just replaced the hard drive (why does that need two days?) and they only needed to test it. They would send it back the notebook the day after. It should be back by Friday.

I could imagine it being because the notebook was not delivered on Friday, but only today, Monday. But admittedly, this could be UPS's fault all the same.

Then it is probably because when I opened the box, set down my notebook, inserted the new battery (they did actually do good in that area), opened up the CD drive to insert a boot disk, a small screw fell out. Yes, an actual screw. Of the kind that is supposed to keep together, say, a notebook. Opening up my notebook to see where it came from turned up nothing, so they probably accidentally dropped in a screw. Can you spell incompetence?

Now, the real reason I'm not writing a nice post about MSI is even worse than all that I've written before. You would wondering, how could the screw (haha) up even more than they have already done so far? You probably guessed: They didn't replace the hard drive. That's right, it's the same one.

The first thing I did after booting up from my UBCD was running smartctl. I noticed the "new" disk having a lot of poweron hours, so I reckoned they might have replaced it with a refurbished disk. Not so nice, but it happens. When scrolling on to the error log section, showed a number of read errors, with section numbers similar to my old disk.

Comparing serial numbers with the smart log I sent to them originally proved this horrible fact: They sent back my old hard drive. They delayed sending back by notebook by 6 fscking days to do absolutely nothing. Or perhaps they did do something. The guy on the phone Wednesday said that the drive was already replaced. Would they have changed their mind and swapped back my old drive? Is that why it took them so long? I might have known, if it wasn't for their "not communicating" policy.

Well, next thing in the morning, I will be communicating with them. I hardly ever get angry, it's just not my thing. But right now, I'm completely pissed. They had better get down on their knees at the phone tommorrow, agree with everything I say to them and most importantly: Send me a new hard drive right away. I'll install it myself and send them back the old one when I feel like it. But I expect that is not going to be "policy" either.

So far, I've been quite happy with MSI in general. A lot of my hardware is from them, without too much problems. Too bad for them, but they've certainly lost a costumer. Now, I'm off to do some fun stuff, else I'm afraid I'll break something...

 
1 comment -:- permalink -:- 19:57
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