Thursday 6 December 2007

I am laptop-less, but disk-ful

Today I went for the second time[1] to emag's service[2] to have my laptop's[*] battery replaced since it was powering the laptop only for 15 (yes, fifteen) minutes. This after only 11 months since I bought the laptop[**].

I didn't observed this drastic reduction until recently (last time I remember was about 1 hour and 50 minutes, back in August), because I wasn't so mobile since August.

To make the long story short, I had to: wait, wait, argue, wait, argue, talk normally to the manager, wait, wait, argue, argue, observe sheer contempt from the personal when I asked again for the manager, talked normally to the manager, left after 4-5 hours wasted (+2 yesterday).

All this just to be able to keep my data safe by holding on to my hard disk, since they insisted they wanted the whole laptop[3], and making them write on the warranty receipt they were the ones who pulled out the HDD (I might be over-cautious/paranoid, but I wouldn't trust emag with the garbage bin).


Now I am on a forced vacation away from Debian for an undefined time, although I might be able to send mails and do make small patches from work.


Hey, emag:
  • teach your employees to behave properly like the manager did! (I don't remember her name, sorry, I'm really bad with names)
  • you'd better redirect clients with broken hardware to the actual services instead of acting like a useless buffer when is clear you're over your heads
  • simple and obvious defects like it was in my case (I could have proven it in exactly 15 minutes) should be handled with minimum impact for the client, for example, keep the faulty battery, but let me take home the laptop


[*] Dell Inspiron 6400 / E1505
[**] when I think the long battery time was one of the most important points, it looks ridiculous now to have such a bad degradation in such a short time

[1] first was yesterday, but due to some support person's incompetence I had to postpone - I asked two questions, they gave me two wrong answers
[2] after all this I wouldn't recommend emag to anyone
[3] You might ask why would they need the whole laptop for a clear 'battery is broken' complaint? Apparently "the service can't test the batteries without the laptop". They probably have neither any spare laptops nor dedicated equipment to measure batteries.

4 comments:

Philippe Cloutier said...

You seem so lucky :)

At the risk of hijacking your blog...I ordered an ASUS barebone including a battery (over 3 hours) in August 2005. 4 months later a friend who did the same and me asked for a first warranty since the battery was faulty and wouldn't charge past 80% anymore. In May 2007, ASUS's warranty was over, but my battery didn't last more than 10 minutes. I ordered a new battery on 2007-07-15 from NCIX, the reseller which sold us the barebone, as a "special order". After 2 months, I contacted NCIX and they admitted they were unable to get the battery. Eventually I succeeded to get them to write a letter stating that for Mastercard. It was pretty obvious at this point that there were no more batteries for M7A available. After much waiting after Mastercard, they pointed me to a store which offered the battery...also as a special order. I had to do a deposit, and I'm already waiting since 2 weeks.

So, maybe you're better with etag than Mastercard's extended "warranty" :)

Anonymous said...

For ASUS it seems to be a BIOS/software issue:

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3537

Philippe Cloutier said...

anonymous, it doesn't seem to be the problem, but thanks, it's interesting anyway.

Anonymous said...
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