Laptop Back Yeah!!!

OK, I just got my laptop back from repair. Thankfully I had an extended warranty from Costco. It took over a week to get back, but I did not have to pay for the replacement of two hard drives and the motherboard. I can handle a week of no PC for several hundred dollars.

I was fairly happy this time, but the last time it was horrible. Costco sent it to Micro Medics. They were awful. I am a network engineer that manages servers, I know what I am talking about. They were to replace the motherboard (video chipset) and one hard drive. The laptop has two and they knew that. They were told by Costco all of the problems from the ticket system that they share. This is what they ended up doing.

The replaced the motherboard fairly easily. The thing is a mess to get out so I will give them some slack for that. However, that is where they stopped. They then installed the OS (Vista Home Basic 32-bit) onto the 64-bit system that has Vista Ultimate. I sent them the system recovery disk for the to use. They did not even complete the restart and powered down by pressing the power button after the first load. When I started the PC I saw the Windows is starting for the first time message. This is really bad thing to see on a repair. If they did not run through the load and test functionality they should probably be fired.

Costco called me back as I was determining how bad Micro Medics was, and they had Micro Medics send me a UPS shipping label. Micro Medics were not able to copy and paste my email address out of the ticket system, so they sat for three days on this. Costco was the one to get me a new box shipped. Micro Medics used standard ground on it.

Once I sent it back, they took over a week to work on this. I got it back with a new hard drive, but the OS was still Vista Home Basic 32-bit. The second hard drive was not even added to the computer using the disk management snap in. At least I was able to fix everything myself. A grandmother would have sent it back a third time. Micro Medics sucks a lot.

If you ever have to send anything into Costco to get repaired under warranty, ask them to send it to another vendor than Micro Medics. They have several that they use.