A grouse, and an oldie...

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Why in the living hell does Toshiba charge $40 for a Satellite A105 laptop recovery CD?  A friend of mine needs a new one (hers was lost/destroyed) and Toshiba says that the $40 is a "shipping charge."  Who are they shipping via, EBay and the MOON?

Anyway, to reward you all for listening to my gripe, an email we got many years ago at some OEM tech support before all our jobs were shipped to India...

"My pet monkey, Milo, ate some of the keys off the keyboard of my laptop computer.  Is this covered under the warranty?"

HAHAHA yep.  Except no.

Comments

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

I ordered a restore disc for my Inspiron 6K laptop from Dell. What arrived was a series of discs, including a Windows XP OEM disc, including various drivers and so forth.

So instead of a system restore disc (which might have, say, restored my rewritten boot sector), I got a bunch of discs which, in the hands of a capable user, could be used to restore the laptop to its factory state, sans Dell boot sector.

Of course, the discs were for the model that replaced the Inspiron 6K in Dell's product lineup, and most of the drivers were flat-out incompatible with my hardware. Fortunately, the wifi drivers were compatible, and so I was able to simply download the needed drivers.

I feel really bad for anyone who needs to do a system restore and isn't technically inclined...

[drquuxum.livejournal.com]

I love how the luser mentioned the monkey's name, as if we know him personally. "Oh, Milo! Yeah, we understand. Just as long as he didn't stuff poo in the PCMCIA slot, it's covered."

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

:D I'm just wondering if the user had perhaps watched too many legal dramas and was therefore trying to "humanize" the issue and make us sympathize with him by mentioning the monkey's name.

Oh, I sympathized, but there was no way I could have put that in for a warranty repair--it would have gotten tossed right back at me.

[phrogg.livejournal.com]

I've pulled it off. Well, it wasn't a monkey, but several keys were missing. My write-up to Dell was "several keys on laptop keyboard inoperable."

The keyboard came, and apparently it's one of the few parts on that model that wasn't required to be mailed back. So i kept the keyboard around for spare keys for the next person.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Well done! It was Dell I was working at and at the time, some laptops had the depot warranty, where you'd ship the thing in, and some had just parts, where we would have shipped a keyboard out.

Had this guy had a warranty that was just parts, and had he not told us about Milo, he would have probably been in the clear! But he had a depot warranty and a truth fetish. ;)

[phrogg.livejournal.com]

Our shop has several Dell tech licenses, so we almost never send a whole system back.

I did have some fun with the keyboard, though...shortly after this, we had a new proximity scan security system put in. As a joke, i mounted the keyboard just above one of the sensors to confuse people (with better success than i could have imagined).
It stayed up until someone else came to us because they'd lost keys on another laptop, so i had to take it down and use keys from it. :(

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. I was with the "home and small business" unit, so we didn't deal too much with places that had their own licenses.

Though the "home and small business" unit should be renamed the "home and people trying to run small businesses who try to make revenue primarily through threatening lawsuits against their computer manufacturer and/or ISP."

[curmudgn]

"Sue away, Bright Eyes. We got more lawyers than you do, and we've already paid for 'em. YOU, OTOH, have to pay-as-you-go with yours."

[curmudgn]

And I take it he hadn't had the gumption to buy Complete Care? Before now, I've replaced an AC adapter and power cord that a dog had chewed on. (Yes, animal damage does come under the "accidental damage" clause.) Had he had CC, Milo's escapade would have been covered. Further, even if he had a RTS warranty, you coulda POS'd or EXG'd him a keyboard.

Now we won't talk about the escalated case where we finally got the college-student customer to admit he'd been using his Lat D600 as a frisbee, instead of "dropped it off a dorm balcony" as he'd claimed at first. THAT one even CC wouldn't get him out of.

[wibbble]

I think the best warranty issue I got when I was still in general support was someone whose daughter had dropped the phone in the toilet. I was trying to explain that we don't cover liquid ingress, but that a repair centre could fix it for a fee, when he said that his daughter had flushed it away and it was gone.

He wanted a replacement under warranty.

[zig-mover.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but Sony wants $30 to send the recovery CD for my new-ish laptop as well. It's a scam.

[110billion.livejournal.com]

When I asked for recovery CDs for my dad's Tevion (some random cheap brand here in .au) PC, they gave it to us on dodgy burnt CDs with handwritten labels.

Seriously, come on.

[110billion.livejournal.com]

btw, effing awesome icon.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Gateway wanted $35 for their Drivers CD (which everything you needed was on their website - it was effectively a convenience fee for not having to go bug a buddy to burn you a CD with the drivers you needed), would not send their proprietary Applications CD under any circumstances due to licensing agreements with the makers of those applications, and would sell people a new retail copy of XP if they lost that disk, telling them the CD Key on the back of their machine would only work on another Gateway machine (it's a standard OEM license key, and in fact the disks they shipped were identical to OEM copies from MS - no vendor overlays at all on that disk, they were all on the other two CDs in the restoration kit).

They now have switched to a burn-your-own-restore-CD system that allows the untalented luser to create their own coasters and likewise not even back up the proprietary application restore hidden partition if things really get hosed. As of a year ago they were still not shipping premade restore disks (except for the OS) unless there was no burner in the system (rare) or there was a colossal problem.

[jecook]

Heh.

We are a Dell shop at work. We also have a site license agreement with MS.

I was tasked with scratch building a new image for all the future desktop machines that we are ordering.
Even though we requested XP Pro on the new machines, the license plate on them was for the x64 flavor of XP and came with a driver CD. We didn't get a copy of XP on it at our request, interestingly enough.

It was still a weeks work build a test image with all our various customizations and pre-installed apps. And I learned how to use Sysprep too, so that was overall a win.

[jarad.livejournal.com]

We gave up trying to build standardised images for our Dell workstations a while back. As an example, we bought in a batch of 5 Dell Dimenion 9100's, and one of the other techs set about making a standard image to run on them.

Except no two of them were the same. They all met the spec for the order and our requirements, but one had a different graphics card, another a different sound chipset, another a different network chipset and so on. Don't ask me how they managed it, as the latter two were built-in to the motherboard components.

Toshiba I have another tale about. At one point, the owner of the company loved toshiba laptops. So much so that he went out and bought one of their uber-lightweight tablets. Some 6 months later, he decides he doesn't like it, buys himself a new Vaio and passes the tablet to me for a reinstall so it can be given to a sales droid. This laptop, being a lightweight model, did not have a built-in DVD drive, and so the boss had bought an external USB DVD writer to use with it. Except, the BIOS did not recognise the drive as a bootable drive. After some digging, it turned out the only drive supported by the BIOS, was Toshiba's own external DVD drive... for which they charged about 8 times the price you would expect to pay for a USB-to-IDE interface and a 20 quid DVD drive. I ended up using a Dell and a copy of the Toshiba restore DVD that I hacked to bypass the 'Toshiba only' check to get the thing reinstalled. That was the last Toshiba we bought in.

[jjjiii]

Host a torrent of the .iso of that disk and help them reduce their costs.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

If I had it, that would certainly be something I'd consider :)

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

My HP recovery CDs a couple months ago were like... twelve bucks, if memory serves. Good stuff.

[silveryrose.livejournal.com]

I feel for your friend.

I have an A105 myself that came with XP MCE 2005 (not by choice, believe me) and I seriously wish I hadn't got the damn thing.

Just a small sampling of the issues this unit has:

1. The recovery DVDs (set of 2) don't have the necessary files to install/reinstall any of the optional MCE extras
2. The drivers for the Mini-PCI Wireless NIC in the specific model I have aren't included in the full disk recovery mode, they can only be installed from the Drivers and Application Recovery mode
3. The Firewire port randomly decides that my iPod should receive power, but not actually have the drivers loaded so it can be seen and used.

Oh, and I must say that I loved Toshiba's solution to the recovery DVDs not having the MCE optional component files: "If you have a friend who has a computer with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, ask them if you can just copy the files from their system."