Str8Dog's Journal: Hardware Customer/Technical Support is a Joke

Let me tell you a story. For Christmas, Johnny's decided to let me build a dream machine. He had been keeping a list of all the hardware that he wanted to put into his next box for close to 6 months; updating it religiously ever week. She took his list and bought every thing on it. The beauty of the machine floored him. It ran like a monster! With the dual processors and a spankin' GeForce 3 Ti 500, he was getting over 190 FPS in Quake 3 at 1024x768/32-bit color. Heaven, I think he was in heaven.
About 45 days after building the box, Johnny decided to take it to work so he could install some software and show it off. Johnny quickly set the box up as soon as he arrived and powered it up. To his dismay the video had four neat rows of triangles across the screen and the box refused to boot at all. He assumed that the GeForce 3 had wiggled loose in transport and turned the box off.

I'll save you the in depth description of everything Johnny tried to resolve the issue, lets just say that after several hours of troubleshooting, He decided to take the card out, put his old GeForce 2 MX back in and see what happens. And as you probably already suspect, I was back in business with a $350.00 US paperweight. (opps,.. I mean Johnny. Damn.. yes, I admit it.. I fried my GeForce 3 and had no idea how I did it.)

Well now that we have dropped the Johnny façade, let's talk about the next week of my life I will never get back. The store return period had been up for over 3 weeks, and I was faced with contacting the manufacturer. I still had the box it came in and believe it or not there was an 800 number printed on the outside with text proclaiming "FREE TECHNICAL SUPPORT". I called the number to see about a RMA. Believe it or not the IVR suggests you submit a support incident on their web page and hangs up on you! Don't believe me? Call yourself: 877-484-5536

Next, I visited their website based on the information supplied by their ever so kind IVR system. I submitted my case through their "web based" email system and waited. And waited. And waited. I waited for 7 days before getting a reply. The reply simply gave me an RMA number and informed me that ALL documents, disks and devices needed to be shipped back in the original box and upon receipt of the goods they would process my RMA. I could expect a 6-8 week wait. Welcome to my hell.

Coming soon, we will be reviewing the Technical Support offered by manufacturers and rating them on how well they stand behind their warranty. If you are interested in helping, we really need to start gathering support phone numbers offered by documentation included with GeForce 3 Ti 5 Video cards. If you have one, post it in the comments.