Coventry's Journal: ABS support sucks.

So, 5 months ago we bought a pair of laptops to replace our aging workhorses. I wanted an A64 processor, and decent video, so after some hunting I settled on a uniwill-based ABS G3 machine. We got 2 of them.

Laptop #1 had a faulty keyboard - the left side of the keyboard was rather loose and would clatter as you typed. this turned out to be an issue with a retaining tab on the left side of the keyboard. after sending the notebook in to be fixed, they replaced the keyboard. Luckily, since we had just gotten the machine, I still had my old workhorse to use.

Now, Laptop #2 has turned into a nightmare. It crashes when you go to do anything semi-intensive: launch photoshop, watch a quicktime or realvideo stream, compile a project.

It doesn't blue-screen, it just reboots. Most of the time. Other times it shuts itself completly off.

We have lost a lot of time to dealing with the issues on this laptop. Unfortunatly, it wasn't acting up during the first 30 days. Now, it is almost unusable.

I don't blame ABS for the quality of the machine - they just resell uniwill models - but I DO blame them for having horrible service. for the last 4.5 weeks we've been trying to get this issue resolved. They've had us open the machine, swap the memory, run with only one memory slot filled (tried both slots), try different memory, etc. All to no avail. The frustrating part is that this whole process should have been over weeks ago... but their support line just takes your name and number, and then a support tech calls you back. Sometimes days later - even if you call each day and bug them about the issue.

Thier supervisors for thier CSRs don't return calls, tend to offload you to lackeys, and are rude.

We have a ~1.9k paperweight currently. We've been asked to try and reload the OS to factory with the 'new' ram they sent us. This is the same ram that the machine won't even POST with if both modules are in the machine, so they want us to try with just a single stick of ram.

All we want is a friggin RMA. Honestly, I'm tempted to look up thier corp office and demand to return both machines and get our money back. At this point, loosing 15-25% in restocking fees would be better than dealing with thier service and these broken machines.

no doubt..

[huckda]

HP/Compaq has a really nice AMD64 laptop...
we bought one and it performs quite well as a workhorse machine. I think we even got it at bestbuy when we returned some other crappy laptop that was a lemon.

Re:no doubt..

[Coventry]

I've liked the HPQ A64 latops, but the video cards they offer on them always seem outdated. I seem to recall seeing 3200+ CPUs coupled with GeForce Go 440 32MB cards. Has this improved in recent models? which model have you purchased?

Unfortunatly, after looking at ebay, we'd loose about 50% of the cost of these machine's ebaying them, even though new they are only 10-15% cheaper than when we bought them (during a very good sale).

Unless we can get ABS to take them back, we're kinda screwed on recovering